Planning a trip to Churchill, Canada? A pair of University of Central Florida biologists wants a peek at your photos.
Jane Waterman and James Roth, both UCF professors who study Churchill’s famous polar bear population, have created a first-of-its-kind photo database. They will use special computer programs, including one that’s similar to NASA’s algorithm for mapping stars, to identify individual polar bears by their “whisker prints.”
Each bear has a unique set of spots, like a fingerprint, near its whiskers, Waterman says. The special computer programs identify individual bears by that print, which will help the researchers and their students to track them.
Now, all they need are tourists to snap pictures of the fuzzy creatures and submit their photos to the new online library, which launched this fall at UCF.
Once an image is uploaded to the database, the algorithms extract the natural whisker spot pattern and compare that image pattern to every other photo in the system. Other distinguishing characteristics, such as facial scars, can also be used to identify bears.
“It’s basically like a mark-recapture study,” Roth said. “We hope to be able to tell how many bears spend time in the tourist region, how long they stay in the area and how many of these same bears go into Churchill. We also can examine how these demographics change over time, especially in light of the declining population there.”
The bears were recently listed as threatened species in the U.S. Waterman says observations and research from Churchill’s population, the world’s most well-studied group of polar bears, have shown declining numbers since the 1970s.
Waterman, a Canadian scientist who has camped out in the frigid weather to study the bears, spends most of her time today in sunny Orlando, where many of her students — in shorts and flip flops — observe the bears via remote cameras on the tundra.
For the past three years with support from Polar Bears International, a nonprofit research and conservation organization, Waterman has operated three remote wildlife cameras set up at the mouth of Hudson Bay. The camera observations are part of the UCF professors’ ongoing research into bear behavior, particularly during Churchill’s peak bear-watching tourist season in October and November.
This semester, about 75 UCF student volunteers have helped Waterman monitor the cameras, noting when the bears sit, play or sleep, among other behaviors. Because the camera observations are accessible over the Internet, “anybody in the world who has the software can take data for us,” Waterman said. That includes high school seniors and their environmental science teacher at a private prep school in Tennessee, St. George’s Independent School, who helped document observations on weekends.
“The response from students has just been overwhelming,” Waterman said. “And the educational component is unique. We’re using technology to teach and collect behavior data on free-ranging polar bears from 3,500 kilometers away.”
The cameras’ photos also give researchers a way to estimate bears’ weights. But the images usually aren’t clear or close up enough to identify individual bears.
That’s where the new digital database, the Polar Bear Photo-Identification Library, comes in. Both the database and the remote observations will help scientists understand what’s happening to polar bears and thus to our planet.
The same computer-mapping technology is already helping biologists learn about giant whale sharks through an online visual database that has more than 17,000 photos from eco-tourists around the world. Waterman and Roth worked with those researchers to set up the polar bear library.
So far, the whale shark database has successfully identified or tagged more than 1,400 whale sharks with help from tourists.
The whale shark’s tracking technology is based on an algorithm originally developed by NASA scientists in 1986 to match images of stars from the Hubble Space Telescope, said Jason Holmberg, an information architect who created the program for ECOCEAN, a nonprofit marine conservation organization that studies the whale sharks.
Holmberg’s algorithm has been adapted to polar bears’ spots. The UCF researchers also are using computer imaging from Carlos Anderson, one of Waterman’s former graduate students now pursuing a Ph.D. at Michigan State University.
Anderson’s program compares the placement, size and shape of whisker spots, which “just adds another way of matching patterns to the set of algorithms that already exist,” he said.
“It’s been a really cool experience,” Anderson said. “And it shows there’s plenty of opportunity for people like me who have a computer science background but are really interested in biology to combine the two.”
To learn more about the polar bear photo library and the types of images that researchers are seeking, visit http://polarbears.ucf.edu.
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