Luminous ID
After a two-year long collaborative project at CU Boulder between the Computer Science Department, the Environmental Studies program, and INSTAAR, lab member Nathalie Chardon recently launched the Luminous ID app. This app serves as an alpine plant field guide for the Niwot LTER, with a filtering function that allows users to quickly narrow down a list of possible species. Users can also upload a photograph and GPS information of the species they observe, ultimately providing LTER researchers with a photographic and geographic dataset of species occurrences. Coupled with climate and topographic data available for the Niwot LTER, the data generated from this citizen science project will be invaluable in examining how species phenology is affected by global climate change.