Marsh Explorer Game

Date

2013-05

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Abstract

An ecosystem is a community of plants and animals, which interact with the environmental system for common resources like water, air, and soil. Several human-related activities or climatic changes affect these communities, which leads to stress in their natural habitat. The outcome of this stress is scarcity of necessary resources. As a result of this scarcity, the species in these communities compete with each other for their survival. The study of the growth behavior of these communities, through competition as well as reproduction, is the main objective of our project. Manually analyzing large amounts of spatially explicit data is very laborious and resource constraining. Thus, there is a need to develop a systematic way of collecting, parameterizing and validating spatially explicit data in the clonal plant community.

Data acquisition was done for 3 years in Sapelo Island located in McIntosh County, Georgia, to retrieve information regarding marsh and dominant plants found in that area. Sapelo Island is the fourth largest barrier island in the State of Georgia, with an area of 16,500-acres. The sampling area was approximately 3,200 square meters. Images were captured for each square meter of this area for three consecutive years. These images are now being used for the Marsh Explorer game to gain information (count, location, etc.) of the plant and animal species in these images.

The input of the game will be a series of images which contain spatially extensive digital information about clonal plant communities. The game will train the player by presenting him/her with an image for which we have preprocessed information. By displaying a preprocessed image, the aim is to see if the players are able to identify plants and animals correctly or not. A player will be awarded points when the player correctly identifies an animal or a plant from the image. After a player scores points above the threshold value, i.e., is trained, player will be presented with unprocessed images. The final output of this game will be an accurate description of the marsh, i.e., identification of plant and animal species together with their spatial locations.

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Keywords

Web application, Games, Volunteer computing, PHP, Identification

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