Guan-Shuo Mai

Academia Sinica · Biodiversity Research Center

The emergence of social media enables people to interact with others on the web in ways that are media-rich ("updates" or "posts" can be text, photo, audio, video, etc), time-shifted (correspondence need not happen at once or within a pre-defined time frame), and social in nature. By utilizing social media, citizen science projects can potentially...

The reach of dominating social media like Facebook and Twitter in the current population is enormous, and these media have long been leveraged for diverse applications. In particular, for some citizen science projects, existing social media increasingly become platforms on which participants interact and contribute. These user contributions, often...

Reptile Road Mortality (in Chinese, 路殺社) is a citizen science project which aims to collect reports of dead animals that have been struck and/or killed by motor vehicles through the use of Facebook. The use of Facebook makes citizen easy to provide their observations. However, the crowdsourced information contributed by citizens through social medi...

Explaining colour variation among animals at broad geographic scales remains challenging. Here we demonstrate how deep learning—a form of artificial intelligence—can reveal subtle but robust patterns of colour feature variation along an ecological gradient, as well as help identify the underlying mechanisms generating this biogeographic pattern. Us...

Metadata Catalog (Metacat) is a tool that has been adapted independently by EAP-ILTER member networks since 2004. Metacat is a repository for data and metadata, which helps scientist find, understand and effectively use such data sets. The research data sets are currently documented in these Metacats in a standardized way and provide the scientific...

The major purpose of this study was to update a Taiwanese forest fire database using the open-source software MySQL, PHP, and Exhibit to serve as guidelines for fire policy-making and fire-suppression practices. We collected fire records from forest fire summary reports of the Taiwan Forest Bureau from 1963 to 2013 and designed a database. There we...

Roadkills are a serious threat to wild birds due to the rapid development of road systems. However, there was no monitoring program to assess the pattern of roadkills in Taiwan. We created a Facebook group as a citizen science platform to monitor the roadkill events in Taiwan since 2011. There were 1,159 roadkill events of birds recorded by 195 vol...

The integration of Taiwan's biodiversity databases started in 2001, the same year that Taiwan joined GBIF as an associate participant. Taiwan, hence, embarked on a decade of integrating biodiversity data. Under the support of NSC and COA, the database and websites of TaiBIF, TaiBNET (TaiCOL), TaiBOL, and TaiEOL have been established separately and...

This paper describes our experiences in developing a Linking Open Data (LOD) resource for Taiwanese Geographic Names (LOD TGN), extracting Taiwanese place names found in Facebook posts, and linking such place names to the entries in LOD TGN. The aim of this study is to enhance the semantics of User-Generated Content (UGC) through the use of LOD res...

The purpose of this paper is to report and discuss the use of a linked data approach on existing related databases on forest fires, plant specimens, insect collections, forest dynamics plot censuses, and Taiwanese species checklists. We adopted the linked data approach to connect together data intrinsically related from distributed databases. The a...