Project Draft :
Marine Life Mapper

Our group

Astrid HEE: https://oxidized-breezy-drip.glitch.me/
Baptiste LEVRARD: https://mousy-geode-lycra.glitch.me
Lu ZHANG: https://desert-scandalous-potassium.glitch.me/
Emma LEGER: https://automatic-sulky-flat.glitch.me/
Yiran ZHANG: https://clean-fan-catamaran.glitch.me

Our subject

Our subject is Make tourism more respectful of marine life.
It comes from the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal number 14, entitled "Life below water".

Our research question

The research question we have formulated together is "How can we educate tourists and make them more aware of marine life ?". The two projects ideas below try to answer that question.

Marine Life Mapper

Context

« Make tourism more respectful of marine life » is a derived project from NATO’s Sustainable development goals realised in 2015. Those subjects are generally over looked in mainstreams medias even though a newly gain interest have been seen in people’s interests thanks to documentaries like « Seaspiracy ».

Marine life cannot be reduced to what lies under the sea, being part of an ecosystem, the subject lead us to open our researchs to a more global aspect of ecosystem preservation. We decided to focus on Seaweed and Shells as the core part of our project. Those marine life are largely overlooked up by mainstream tourism, education and interest. Yet, seaweed participate to regulate climate change and reduce the hole in the ozonne layer, and shells are the visible aspects or a more complexe and rarely seen marine life. By targeting tourism industries, the subject also touch the never-ending opposition between personal implication on a global scale phenomena.

With those two main axis targeting « How can we educate tourists and make them more aware of marine life ? » we decided to develop an application destined to any kind of tourist going to the sea side, that would give more informations about this part of the ecosystem. We firmly believe that educated people are taking more sensible actions. That's why, in order to attract people's attention and make the application a bit more interactive, we thought of an application that would work as a challenge. This way, users can have fun while learning. By completing challenges consisting of taking photos of the various species requested, the user will obtain information about the species and will be awarded certain points according to the difficulty of encountering that species.

Target + persona

Marine Life Mapper aims to target eco-interested tourists, and at lesser extent, people living by the seaside.

Demographic factor: the target users are tourists wishing to develop their knowledge of the marine environment while playing on their smartphones. They have between 15 and 45 years old and earn an above average salary. They are digital natives.

Psychographic factor: they are committed to the conservation of the marine environment, always want to know more about ecosystems environments. They love to share their passion for marine life with others. The application appeals on the need of completion and ordering. It aims to create the need to complete a whole area of collectiong infos.

Geographical factor: they are connected and are located at any seaside.

Behavioral factor: they are comfortable with new technologies and own a smartphone. The project appeals to their sens of completion, ordering, thirst of knowledge.

The beneficiaries of the application are tourists, reasearch and marine life.

Persona

Laura Garnier-Schmit is 34, she is a young mother of two, Lucas (4) and Gabriel (2). She is married to Alexandre Schmit. After completing her studies at Dijon business school in 2014 she moved to Paris to find a job in her studied field : Marketing. Her husband Alexandre has done similar studies and is working in the same field as her. After having devoted the beginning her mid-twenties to her career and finally getting a job of communication manager and project manager in a start-up, she now has a stable income and wants to put on hold her career motivations to focus on her family life.

While living in Paris she has been increasingly interested by sustainable development and eco-responsibles actions. She started to take care of her carbon footprint and her plastic footprint. She has been doing her foodshopping to her local « Bio-coop », looking for the best way to assimilate being responsible of two very young child and environment protection, shopping and green ethic, and joined a NGO oriented toward green city development.

When she is not taking care of Lucas and Gabriel, she is hanging out with her friends at yoga sessions, gym sessions, local events, watch streaming platform and chill infront of it, take breaks from Paris to go to her mother town with her family, go to the beach and go on holiday to exotic places.

She is an active mother and wants everybody to know that her life wasn’t impacted in a bad way at the birth of her first child. She is still active in her NGO, never miss one gym or yoga session, always trying hard to know the last trends on several subjects that are work related, associative, and social network related.

Travelling is for her the best way to discover new cultures. While staying in a three stars resort, she is looking to juggle the price and the environmental footprint of her holiday. While doing so, she wants to know more about the environmental life of the country she is staying to.

She heard of all, or close, applications via her social circle. She is delighted that the app works as a game, she can both have fun and learn but also play with her children. Indeed, she wants to share the information she learned on the app with her children to help them understand that it is important to protect the environment.This application can be a great activity to do during the holidays with her family.

Service offered

As we mentionned it earlier, the project is a mobile application.

We wanted to make it more entertaining than a lexicon of seaweed and shells. The application will work as a challenge. Each day, the user will have to take up different challenges and will be awarded different points depending on the rarity of the species taken in the photo.The species photographed will then be displayed on a map where the species photographed will be listed. We will include the map via Google maps API. Through gamification we have decided to make it work like a photo album where you pin point the pictures on a map at the place you took them.

An algorithm will identify the picture, describe which kind of seaweed and shell it is and give informations about it. Those informations would cover the whole scientific aspects of the element : scientific features, it effect on the eco system, its place…

Participative science is one of the main aspect of the project : The collected data would be sent to a lab partner working on marine life subjects.

The application would also feed a captcha kind of data collection, data analysis.

The application will have access to phone’s galleries, phone’s geolocalisation.

Features + user flow

Features

Feature 1 (key feature): Take on challenges - By logging into the application, the user can view a list of challenges and choose to accept them. The challenges are adapted to the user's location, which he/she must enter at the beginning. The challenges are exclusively about taking pictures of specific species.The user can either choose to take a photo using his phone's camera or use a photo from his phone's photo gallery. It is sufficient to post a single photo for each challenges. By completing the challenge, if the user succeeds, a number of points are attributed to him. In addition, the user is given information on the species taken in photo. The information on the different species photographed comes from a scientific database.
Feature 2: Track its challenges on a map

User flow

Initial situation: The user is on holiday in the sea side and see that new challenges are available on the application. He takes his phone, open the app and follow the next steps :
Step 1: Open the landing page that is the map that geolocate where he is
Step 2: Click on "Ready to take on my daily challenge"
Step 3 : A new page is opened after the geolocation and the different challenges are displayed with the number of points awarded according to the species photographed. It will enable him to select the camera mode or the gallery mode
Step 3.1: Camera mode enable the possibility to take a picture
Step 3.2: Gallery mode enable the possibility to select the desired picture
Step 4 : Selection of the element
Step 5 : Loading of the challenge completion page
Final situation : Return to the landing page with the added element on

Illustrations

Benchmark

VigieNature notably « Birdlab » and « Plages Vivantes » projects, both are participative science projects. This method is for us an exemple to see in which way they enable the participative aspect.
Birdlab is an application run on principle of participative science. The goal of the project is to collect data about birds living in several kind of areas (urbans, peri-urbans, rurals) The data focus on their ways of living and focusing on their way of feeding. To participate to the project the user have to do two main tasks :
- Build/Buy a bird table and settle it at a convenient spot where he can observe and take notes of the birds coming to use it.
- Download an app where he will add all the essentials infos of the species, their coming and leaving...
The application also have features of gamification : quizz on birds topics (mandatory to then participate, an essential knowledge of the surrounding birds is a must have to participate), badges, lexicon …
Plage Vivante is a project that run on participating science. The goal is to take collect data of the marine biosphere ; Seaweed, Seaside plants and Seaside birds. The data collected is divided in two main blocks : Pictures related and measurement related. To participate, you only need to have access to internet and their website
Ocean's Zero
This application offers to teach users how to reduce waste through a serie of 25 challenges. The similarity that can be found with our app is the fact that it is based on challenges, thus it is entertaining but unlike our app the scope of application of these challenges is pretty wide and doesn't focus on taking pictures of animals.
My Little Plastic Footprint an application that is used to reduce waste by the consumers and their plastic use. The same way as Ocean’s zero it is divided in challenges to be done daily to monthly and aim to reduce plastic use and therefore being more respectful of the environment. Before accessing to the challenges, you have to describe what plastic goods you already have stopped using.

Smart'Flore by Tela Botanica, allow the user to pin point the species of plants he encounters on the side of any kind of roads he encounters. The user can then share it with the community. Smart'Flore is a great example of a similar themed project. It includes Google Map's API, and enable the user to directly "play" on it.
An essential difference with our project is the targeted user. There is no description and information phase.The user has to know the floral species to be able to fully use the application. For neophytes, the website is giving external ressources on which they can learn.
Seek by INaturalist is our project closest application, they propose similar services such as taking pictures, AI supported recognisation, flora targeted challenges, reward system. Our main differencies are :
- Subject related as they focus on land areas.
- The order we propose the content : We seek to start the flora identification by challenges, they start by identifying the flora and then adding to it challenges.
- The lack of the map feature, which is for us one of our main feature as it help the user to visualise their progression and areas covered. Being used as holidays souvenirs as well as an information application.

References

Sustainability Science Journal A scientific review exploring global sustainable development theme and brand new scientific projects. Many of its articles focus on marine elements. Even though we recommand the whole journal, we draw a special attention toward the article of June 2018 "A computational approach to managing coupled human–environmental systems: the POSEIDON model of ocean fisheries" This project is the best example combinining algorithm and data science tools toward a social goal.
Ocean Panel Being a leader in the maritime economy organisation, in the maritime research. Following the reports and its action help us to understand the contemporary problems of marine life. Ocean panel give us a great overview the sectors in need and the ongoing actions around the world to solve them.
Three apps to help scientific community This article shows other applications that use participatory science to provide data to scientists to further their research on a specific topic. It shows the diversity of topics covered and how providing some information can help them in their research. This article is related to our project because it shows the growing interest and real usefulness of this type of application.

Project Draft : Marine Life Mapper