About Us
The field site for this research project is in Georgia. The Georgia Coastal Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research site (GCE) was established by the National Science Foundation in 2000. The study domain encompasses three adjacent sounds (Altamaha, Doboy, Sapelo) on the coast of Georgia, U.S.A., and includes upland (mainland, barrier islands, marsh hammocks), intertidal (fresh, brackish and salt marsh) and submerged (river, estuary, continental shelf) habitats.
For more information about GCE research, go to Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER.
The goal of this web site is to advance our understanding of salt marsh ecology by providing researchers with large amounts of data on the distributions of marsh plants and animals. We are mapping plant and animal distributions every year over a large area of marsh in order to understand spatial patterns and how they change over time. Each year, we take ~15,000 photographs, but we lack the personnel to align all these photographs ourselves. We need a few thousand citizen scientists to help us by identifying matching features in the photographs using this web site.
This software was developed by Akshay Soni, Prachi Deshpande and Dr. Victoria Hilford at the University of Houston, in collaboration with GCE scientists Dr. Marc Garbey (HOME PAGE) and Dr. Steven Pennings (HOME PAGE).