The BBC writes about an effort in the UK to use crowd sourcing to populate data recording the number of different types of butterflies: the Big Butterfly Count. Participants are asked to spend 15 minutes spotting butterflies and moths. The data, currently 5121 sightings (24 hours later, 5866), is displayed on a map.
A couple of thoughts. Firstly, I think the data could be displayed in a far more engaging manner with a heat map of some sort, with the ability to show clusters of different species at least. The following is an inefficient way to show the data for a species:
Secondly, I wonder if Twitter could be used in some way to channel the data - one could even tweet a picture to the project. That way, the data could be verified and it would come with geolocation and time associated.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the site suffers from the age old problem of inadvertent-tab-ellipsis-renaming:
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