Using FME to Automate the ETL Workflow of a Citizen Science Environmental Monitoring Project

We used FME to automate the normally time-intensive tasks involved in the Citizen Science project MangroveWatch. MangroveWatch is a partnership between scientists that can visually evaluate the condition of mangroves in photographs and concerned citizens that are willing to collect the imagery for the evaluation. Volunteers record video of the entire shoreline of interest, and still frames are subsequently extracted from each second of this video. By noting the position of the video camera at one-second intervals (via hand-held GPS), it is possible, using FME, to automatically assign individual still-frames from the video recordings to portions of the shoreline. The time-savings, made possible through FME, has enabled MangroveWatch in Florida (USA) to greatly expand the amount of coastline that will be monitored in the future.