About
Tea Swamp is a group of citizen scientists located in British Columbia, Canada.
We’re a community research project with IMERSS, and friends with Biodiversity Galiano!
Project Origins
Inspired by Toke Høye’s PollinatorWatch hosted on Zooniverse, we are setting up time-lapse cameras to gather thousands of images of pollinators visiting two common native flowering plants, salal and dull Oregon grape, at a mid-island location on Galiano Island, in the Pacific Northwest. We are also monitoring the local hummingbirds with cameras, and tracking bird and frog sounds.
We plan to automate the analysis of the images to document the number and type of pollinator visitors we get over the flowering season.
We have also set up a weather station, weather sensors and a particulate matter sensor to gather hyperlocal weather and air quality data in the immediate vicinity of our cameras. In addition to monitoring trends in air quality, the particulate matter sensor should give us an estimate of pollen count and detect smoke from wildfire drift.
As well as piloting the technology, these observations will be a window to the day-to-day ins and outs of Galiano pollinators that will help us better understand how wildflowers and pollinators are affected by local weather events.