In floating forests, we seek to harness to power of landsat data and citizen science to understand how and why giant kelp forests have changed around the planet over the past thirty years. Moreover,…

This $804,442.57 cooperative agreement was awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) to support the "In Floating Forests" citizen science project. The project aims to harness Landsat satellite data and citizen science to understand how and why giant kelp forests have changed globally over the past 30 years. Key objectives include expanding the project to map global kelp cover trends, developing a user-friendly interface for creating Landsat-based citizen science projects, and creating educational visualization tools and curricula. This award does not have a set-aside designation. UMass Boston, as a public research university, will leverage its scientific and technical expertise to deliver the contract requirements. The University of Massachusetts system, of which UMass Boston is a part, has a broad portfolio of federal research grants and contracts across various disciplines.

In floating forests, we seek to harness to power of landsat data and citizen science to understand how and why giant kelp forests have changed around the planet over the past thirty years. Moreover, we hope to use our citizen science project as a test case for the development of a user-friendly interface for the creation of online landsat-based citizen science projects at the zooniverse (http:// zooniverse.ORG). Last, we seek to enhance engagement for this and future projects via the development of accessible visualization tools and curricula for university and high school students. During the prototype phase we completed a total overhaul of our landsat image processing pipeline for creating imagery for citizen science classification. We conducted a beta and complete relaunch of our platform at http://floatingforests.ORG, which included the development of a new smartphone APP. This has seen tens of thousands of classifications and over one thousand unique users since the launch on december 13, 2017. We developed and tested a university level set of lab exercises with floating forests at its core at a primarily undergraduate and minority serving institution. We made available all of the data from version 1.0 of our platform, which consisted of ~750,000 classifications. Last, we used this data to validate our citizen science based approach to landsat classification, and found that our consensus based classification approach agreed very well with expert classifications. In the implementation phase, we will expand floating forests to map change in global kelp cover from the 1980S to the present. We will identify trends in global kelp cover, examine whether kelp range limits have shifted, and assess the degree to which these shifts are related to climate change. We will build and deploy a user friendly generalized interface for creating a landsat- based citizen science project and demonstrate IT at scientific meetings to facilitate its adoption. We will build additional visualization tools for landsat-based projects to allow citizen scientists to quickly and easily work with our data. We will couple this with iterated versions of high school and university-level curricula that grow with these tools. Last, we will maintain a consistent data pipeline so that kelp forest citizen and professional scientists have easy direct access to our data.