GEI Insight | Photography and Citizen Science For Climate Change
Photo Source: China Icons
Nearby our office at GEI and throughout Beijing, the gingko and poplar trees are right in the midst of bursting into their bright fall yellow colors. Anyone who has been to Beijing in the fall can tell you that these unmistakable yellow leaves that fill the city are among the most memorable parts of their visit. While gingko trees are originally from China, today you can find them around the world in yards, gardens, and streets.
Photo Source: Vanderbilt University
Even though we pass these trees daily, you probably didn’t know that they are actually hundreds of millionsof years old. One particular ginkgo tree in China’s Zhongnan Mountains has caught the public’s attention over the last several years because of its age; the tree is 1,400 years oldand going strong.
During the time that ginkgoes have overlapped with human history, they have been used for a variety of medicinal purposes, ranging from the treatment of blood disorders to improving memory. In traditional Chinese medicine, gingko leaves can be used to relieve coughing and wheezing.
Photo Source: News-Medicine.Net
Beyond their medicinal uses, ginkgo trees today are being used to assess the future impact of climate change on living organisms. Scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US state of Maryland are currently undertaking a study that exposes each of a set of ginkgo trees to different levels of carbon dioxide to determine how the earth’s atmosphere has changed over the past millennia and in order to forecast how increased levels of carbon dioxide will affect biological functioning.
The Smithsonian’s ginkgo tree carbon dioxide experiment in action.
Photo Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Aside from these professional efforts, in the US National Museum of Natural History’s Fossil Atmospheres project, citizen science is being employed to crowdsource the analysis of ginkgo leaf fossils for further insights on past carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
Citizen science is also currently being used as a resource in other efforts to measure climate change impacts via foliage changes throughout the US and Canada. While the impact of climate change on fall foliage has not been widely studied in the past, scientists from the Northeastern US and Southern Canada are now working both independently and with citizen scientists to collect photos showing the shifts in leaf changing patterns over time. All the photos taken by tourists over the past decades are useful for more than photo albums, it turns out. One of the efforts in the US state of Maine is using tourist photos to fill in gaps in historical photos of the changing foliage in order to gain a broader understanding of climate shifts over time. In Canada, a team of scientists is using a periodic photo capture system to analyze leaf-changing data over time to reveal the daily changes that contribute to larger trends.
While efforts of channeling citizen science to investigate the shifting pattern of fall leaves changing has not been carried out in China yet, there is definitely potential for such efforts to take place. From Dongbei to Inner Mongolia to Northern Xinjiang, throughout the fall, northern China is flooded with rich fall colors.
Some of the most beautiful sites for “leaf peepers,” or tourists who travel to see the colorful autumn leaves, are right near one of China’s biggest tourist attractions near Beijing, the Great Wall. With thousands of photos snapped in each of these places each year, the possibility to channel citizen science to document changes in climate patterns is right there—it’s just waiting for a scientist to lead the effort.
Even if citizen science has not yet been employed to track leaf changes in China, within the country, its popularity is growing as a more sustainable way of getting locals involved in conservation efforts. In fact, you could say that citizen science started in China 3,500 years ago, as both local citizens and officials worked collaboratively to track locust outbreaks. More recently, GEI has worked extensively in this area, particularly in China’s Western regions, training locals in skills ranging from water quality monitoring to general ecosystem monitoring and protection efforts.
According to Dr. Xu Shengnian, GEI Energy & Climate Change Program Officer, “There are more and more young people realizing the importance of citizen science, and the numbers of Chinese (and Asian) enthusiastic young citizen scientists (or researchers) are growing. However, to carry out this type of crowdsourcing in a more scientific way will require more effort from young people going forward.”
With a pre-existing framework for citizen science in China, in addition to the northern regions of the countries majestic fall foliage, who knows—maybe a groundbreaking project that uses citizen science to track climate change through trees is right down the road.
Editor: Кокте́йль Мо́лотова
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