Richard Schuster on mapping migrations with citizen science
Making science more accessible with data visualization
A software developer for an internet casino in Austria, Richard Schuster was tired of his desk job.
He had a background in electrical engineering, but it was a different field of STEM that began to interest him as he considered his career options.
“During that time I really got interested in science, and I thought — I really don’t want to sit in a room in front of a screen every day for the rest of my life,” Schuster said. “So that’s when I started thinking about what alternatives I could potentially pursue, and that’s why I eventually started going back to University and started to do a biology degree.”
Schuster, now a Liber Ero Post-Doctoral Fellow at Carleton University with a PhD in Forest and Conservation Sciences from the University of British Columbia, said he’s come full circle in some ways; he’s back behind a desk.
“I do pretty much sit in front of my screen all day, but it’s different,” he said. “I’m still in front of my computer, but I use data on birds or other animals to actually inform conservationists, so that’s probably more aligned with what I really care about.”
Visualizing species movement
Schuster’s work takes him in a variety of directions, but his background in programming always comes in handy when it’s time to visualize the data.
For his Liber Ero fellowship, Schuster is working on a project that could help conservationists identify top-priority locations along the migratory paths of birds.
“About a third of [bird species] are at high-risk in terms of conservation,” Schuster said. “They’re declining very strongly. So we’re working on figuring out which parts of their journey throughout the year are most important to actually preserve.”
He builds maps like the one shown here using data gathered by citizen scientists — people who aren’t professional scientists but are still passionate about and engaged in science — through a project called eBird.
eBird, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, allows any birder to upload information about the kinds of birds they saw or heard in a given location at a given time of year. The database has grown tremendously since it launched in 2002.
“It’s a huge database at the moment — it’s always changing and increasing…it just crossed the half-billion observation benchmark,” Schuster said.
While all of eBird’s data is open-access, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accessible. In order to make sense of millions of data points for hundreds of different species of birds, it needs to be analyzed and put into visuals that show meaningful trends and movements. Thankfully, this is Schuster’s forte, and one of the most rewarding parts of his work.
“Coding language — it just looks abstract, but it’s really rewarding when you then start the application and it actually works and you can see a map produced on the screen,” Schuster said. “You basically see how the species move up and down…those are the things that are really gratifying for me because I’m a very visual person, and it’s really great if I can actually see how the code transforms into something visual.”
Democratizing science
When Schuster summed up the essence of his work, he emphasized the importance of making science accessible — for communities and for the citizen scientists that make his work possible.
“We’re really trying to kind of democratize the process of conservation and conservation planning in the way that we are providing people with the tools that they need to actually inform their decisions moving forward if they care about birds,” he said.
eBird isn’t Schuster’s only data visualization project. He works with a variety of government and other groups, like land trusts, in Canada and in the U.S. He recently built a tool to help the government track fish in Alaska and Canada, but it’s ended up helping local communities understand their fish populations too.
“The tool is also used to then bring the information back to the community members, and tell them how many fish were caught in their community, how does it compare to other communities in the region, and how it might look like over time, too, so you get some figures in terms of the trend of the catch,” he explained.
Who is Richard Schuster’s personal powerhouse?
Schuster said it was hard to think of just one person, but he decided to go with Hugh Possingham, The Chief Scientist of The Nature Conservancy.
“He really encapsulates the spirit of conservation biology or conservation planning,” Schuster said. “Thinking about the tools or the approaches that I’m using in my own work pretty much every day — they’re all kind of developed or at least co-developed by him, and so for me, that’s really the person that shaped my field the most.”
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