Digital Conservation: Birds, Blogs and Volunteers

Governments and NGOs worldwide devote considerable efforts to wildlife conservation. Building public support for such initiatives often involves web-based approaches, which facilitate bringing the natural world closer to people. Web-based approaches can be particularly effective for, often harder to reach, younger audiences. Our Natural Language Generation (NLG) research has investigated the use of automatically generated narratives for communicating complex data to audiences. We developed an exciting new website using NLG to bring up-to-date information about wild animals in their natural environment to both nature and technology enthusiasts. We believe this work pioneers communication of nature conservation through new media.

For Blogging Birds to become a conservation tool, however, it is required to create an actual following. We propose the following three activities and give indicative budget implications in brackets.
1. Working with the RSPB to learn how best to reach large audiences.
2. Engaging with user communities, thereby exposing target audiences with our current website and variations thereof to capture what dimensions are most important to actual users.
3. Building in new functionality based on the above two activities, most likely including social media and several ways in which users can interact with the tool and its users.

We have developed ground-breaking technology that helps to tell real-time stories of Scotland's satellite-tagged red kites without any human input. Raw location data from satellite tags are supplemented with environmental data which are automatically analysed to detect patterns; these are ecologically interpreted and directly converted into a blog using Natural Language Generation routines. This automated blogging system is the first of its kind and enables large amounts of data to be instantly converted into readable text. Simply by flying around with a tag on its back, a red kite is allowing a computer to write the story of its life - through weekly blogs about how and why it explores the landscape around it.

The Blogging Birds site (http://redkite.abdn.ac.uk) is developed within the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub at the University of Aberdeen, through collaboration between computer scientists and ecologists working in partnership with conservationists at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Our launch of the very first version of 'Blogging Birds' on 22 August 2013 clearly caught the attention of the press; this was helped by a feature article in 'The Conversation' viewed more than 16,000 times. Extensive articles appeared in widely read magazines such as 'Wired', E&T and PopSci, as well as in newspapers (e.g. Telegraph, Scotsman, Irish Times) and on radio (BBC Radio Scotland live and Out of Doors - 7 min). The Chronicle of Higher Education (circulated to all US academics) wrote an in-depth piece highlighting the technology angle of this innovation. New Scientist wrote a glowing column and AOL made a 1 minute video clip professionally bringing out the essence of Blogging birds (see http://redkite.abdn.ac.uk/press.html for all named sources). This large-scaled press activity led to unprecedented dot.rural twitter activity: more than 1.3 million retweets. Blogging Birds was portrayed as 'fascinating', highly innovative' and 'impressive', and supported by readers' comments. The principle of this innovation took society 'by storm' and generated a huge amount of interest in both the principle of 'birds telling their own story', the reintroduction of this species and the underlying technology. Indeed, our NLG blogs are among the first to inform and inspire a general (rather than a specialist) audience and seemed to have done so with reasonable success. The technology magazine 'Wired' complimented that, when "Reading through the blogs, they flow extremely naturally, seem very erudite and even formulate questions relating to activity of the birds".

Scrutinising the Google Analytics of our website, over 5000 people have visited Blogging Birds from all around the world. Among the top of all NLG sites in terms of use Blogging Birds has provided many people with an encounter of this frontier technology. Importantly, we also managed to attract a following: several hundred people visit the site regularly (>10x in the 6 weeks since launch). It is this aspect which has our particular interest. For Blogging Birds to become a 'new conservation tool' with a wider regular following the site should not only be attractive and dynamic but also interactive, allowing users to engage and contribute material to enhance the blogs. This will create a more engaged community of users who are keen to 'follow' the lives of these charismatic red kites over time.