Addressing environmental change due to climate change and changes in the structure of ecosystems is one of the biggest challenges for both science and policy. Studies of long-term observations, models, and the compilation of empirical measurements that create large databases are becoming the most important tools for mapping the processes that cause future changes in the environment. The essence of Naturalapse is to take advantage of the big data value based on photography.
There was a lot of rain in the spring of 2015, the bog in the botanical garden was under water, the landscape illustrated its ancient condition;
Climate change is no longer just about the scientific community; megapixels and storage capacity began to explode;
These circumstances inspired the pro bono attempt of MATE (Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences), the Beyer Creative and the Broadband Foundation to incorporate a regular landscape photo of the installed scaffold into the protocol of the research site.
A database that can be interpreted by 2022 has been compiled, which is not yet a relevant time period for climate change, but new knowledge can already be extracted from it and it has been confirmed that sampling can be maintained with acceptable accuracy in the long run.
As a result of the experiment, the naturalapse was created, a website on which the material from Soroksár can be browsed and new projects can be started.
Our goal is to turn the interface into a platform-like photo sharing application. Shows of images should not only be taken from an individually installed stand, but also from community stands in public locations identified and registered by geographic location or a QR code. The photos are then automatically transferred to a machine-learning post-processing system that ensures that a database can be created from them.
Making it community-based and interactive can help organize people locally around a landscape, by spreading it, allowing comparisons between regions and thus, communities in certain regions to collaborate. In view of its long-term goal, the extensive use of Naturalapse can become a kind of visual demonstration for a large part of society, the theme of which is the constant change of the natural environment and thus the promotion of environmental and climate awareness in the information society.