Even though Dan Doucette submitted his first spotting only a little over a month ago, he has quickly become a full-fledged Project Noah star. Not only has he submitted some incredible photos, but he has also spent countless hours helping people ID species and is the first Project Noah user to earn the difficult Nat Geo Wildlife Explorer patch. He also had one of his photos picked up and promoted by National Geographic as “Spotting of the Week” recently. In a new effort to showcase the diversity of our community and learn more about the amazing people and organisms we come across, we asked Dan to tell us a little more about himself and his passion for nature. Read on to find out about this Project Noah featured spotter…

My road to traveling and becoming the person I am today began in 1998, when I received my Horticulture Technician Diploma. A month after graduating, I got hired by a prominent business in Niagara to work in the gardens around the falls. It was a seasonal position so during the off season I went to Australia for a month to visit my brother. This was my first solo trip. I became more adventurous by the end of my second season and went to Peru for 2 months. The combination of warm weather, new plants and animals and the raw rugged beauty of the Amazon got me hooked on traveling. It has become my passion, with tropical rainforests being my favorite places. I have been exploring them ever since, from Borneo and Southeast Asia to central Africa and the Amazon. 

My winter trip of 2011/12 will be my 14th consecutive journey. My main interests and goals are to see plants and animals in their native habitat. I always use local guides and try to put much-needed funds into local communities and parks. I want to do my part in showing them that the rainforest is a precious resource that is worth more standing than cut down. Many countries struggle to find the delicate balance between sustainable use and conservation. I try to help by visiting conservation projects in small communities that are trying to help the people make a living with what they have in their own backyard. I like to be there to help support them in their beginning stages and to spread the word.

As much as I enjoy supporting local communities, my true passion is getting into very remote places, far away from any civilization. I love going on long treks with just a guide. I love to hike and camp in off the beaten track destinations. I feel at home roughing it in the middle of the rainforest. However, when I’m not deep in the bush, I also like to visit ancient ruins, hike up volcanoes, explore caves, soak in hot springs and climb the occasional mountain. My traveling has become more focused over the years and so has my dedication to photography. I take many more photos now than I did on my first few trips.

Even since the beginning, I have been documenting everything in a personal journal but over the last few years I have also been keeping a detailed blog that others can access. Many people will never get to experience the things I have, so I want them to feel like they are there with me through my words and photos. The countries I enjoy visiting the most are those few have been to. These include Gabon, Madagascar, DR Congo, Rwanda, Cameroon, Myanmar, Swaziland and Guyana. Though I have been to a lot of places in the tropical world, Antarctica is a dream for me, and will be my last continent to set foot on.

Some of the highlights of my traveling career have been an epic seven-day trek to the remote temple of El Mirador in Guatemala, seeing five species of the world’s largest bloom, Rafflesia, snorkeling with whalesharks in the Philippines, climbing the active volcano of Mount Cameroon, an epic six-day trek in the centre of Madagascar, watching tigers in India, gorilla and chimpanzee trekking in Uganda, climbing three volcanoes in the Virunga range straddling Uganda, Rwanda and DR Congo and staying for two weeks in the pristine rainforest of Danum Valley in Malaysian Borneo. There are many more; too many to list here.

I can’t finish this bio without mentioning and giving credit to some of the amazing people I have met around the world. I am lucky to have had contact with some of the warmest, friendliest, generous, thoughtful, considerate and hospitable individuals this world has to offer. They have made my adventures that much more real and enjoyable. 

I found out about Project Noah on Facebook. I was browsing the news feed and came across a great photo of a Vervet monkey posted by National Geographic. I was intrigued. It turned out it was a ‘spotting of the week’ on Project Noah. I clicked the link to the site and was instantly hooked! I am a nature lover and I have finally found my community.

A huge heartfelt thanks to Dan for all his contributions. You can check out all his Project Noah spottings by heading to his user page and you can swing by his blog too. Keep an eye on our blog for more exciting features, including some more posts from Dan as he sets out on his next adventure.  

5/18 2011Comments

We launched the Project Noah iPhone application back in late February of 2010 as an experiment. Since then, we’ve had an exciting journey, winning a few mobile design competitions and earning the support of National Geographic along the way. Today, I am unbelievably excited to announce our new platform. We listened to all of you closely and took your feedback to heart. We went back to the drawing board to build something even better and even more engaging and it’s finally time to unleash it. As of today, you can download our first ever Android application from the market and you can visit our completely redesigned website by heading over to our new domain, www.projectnoah.org, right now. The org stands for organisms! Our new iPhone app is still under review by Apple so hang tight! We hope to have it approved very soon. 

Beyond a completely new look and feel, here is a sampling of some exciting new features.

• Earn Project Noah patches - designed to look like real scout patches
• Add multiple photos to your spottings
• Request help identifying species and let the community suggest species IDs
• Follow your favorite wildlife spotters and keep track of their submissions
• Create a collection of your favorite photos by choosing your “favorites”
• Join new field missions that get updated based on your location
• Manage all your account setting and spottings from your mobile device
• A powerful new mobile field guide provides better information about nearby wildlife

There’s so much more you’ll have to discover on your own!

I also wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to our inaugural team of Project Noah Rangers. Noah Rangers help the community by identifying species, answering questions, providing reference links, and maintaining the accuracy of our spottings. They are chosen based on their contributions to the site and their commitment to nature.

Here they are by user name. Feel free to check out their collections and say hi!

• anne yen - nature explorer and wildlife artist based in New York
• buggirl1 - young bug lover and nature activist from New Zealand
• eula rubio - wildlife explorer from Spain with over 500 spottings
• garylincoff - fungi and plant expert from New York
• Isabela - teacher and nature lover from Spain with over 1200 spottings
• keithp2012 - wildlife enthusiast and outdoorsman from from New York
• lori.tas - knowledgeable naturalist and wildlife explorer from Tasmania

We’ll be looking for more Noah Rangers in the future, so drop us a line if you think you have what it takes. Also, please let us know if you have any technical issues by emailing us at support@projectnoah.org. For all other questions and comments please email us at info@projectnoah.org. Lastly, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter & Facebook for the latest news.

Thank you so much for your ongoing enthusiasm and support. It means the world to us. I want to take a moment to thank Martin Ceperley, our CTO, and Peter Horvath, our Design Director, for the crazy amount of hours we all spent working on this new release. It wouldn’t have been possible without their talent and dedication.

We hope you enjoy the new platform and please let us know what you think!

—Yasser Ansari, Chief Leaf

2/03 2011Comments 2 notes

Today, I would like to introduce you all to Isabel Rubio Pérez. You might know her better by her nickname Isabela. She made Project Noah history this week when she submitted her 1000th spotting! She is one of our earliest supporters and has contributed an amazing assortment of beautiful photos from all over the world. Some of my favorites include a mountain gorilla from Rwanda, a marine iguana from the Galapagos Islands, and many, many beautiful flowers from around Europe. Isabel and her husband Manuel are passionate about the environment and are true nature lovers to the core. Together, they’ve explored some of the most biologically diverse regions of the planet and they’ve been kind enough to share many of their encounters with us. 

Isabel is a high school teacher and Greenpeace volunteer who lives in the Region of Murcia in south-eastern Spain. She was born and raised in Cartagena and now lives in the capital city, Murcia. Throughout her life she has been in close proximity to both mountains and the sea and through her career as a teacher, she has had the opportunity to live in Colchester, London, and even Wales. 

When her husband Manuel read about Project Noah in Spain’s El Pais newspaper back in May, he shared the story with Isabel and she was instantly hooked. They’ve become a great team documenting and identifying plants and animals together during walks and hikes in the country or along the coast. She mainly uses her iPhone and iPad to contribute, but also visits the Project Noah website from her home computer to add information and reference links to her spottings. What started out as a fun opportunity to experiment with her new phone turned into a powerful way to reconnect with her local wildlife. Lucky for us, Isabel not only shares amazing wildlife encounters from her native Spain, but also from many of her outdoor adventures. From Africa to South America to Europe, Isabel has shared the world with us through her photographs and by doing so has become a powerful representative of our global community. We can’t wait to see what she shares next. I found out she recently started snorkeling, so maybe we’ll see some underwater photography!

Isabel, the Project Noah community would not be what it is today without your ongoing dedication and support. Not only have you given us a glimpse of your beautiful Spain, but you have given us an opportunity to travel around the world with you on your amazing wildlife adventures. On behalf of the Project Noah team and community, I want to sincerely thank you. 

Take a few minutes to explore some of Isabel’s 1000 contributions and make sure you leave her some thank you notes! http://www.projectnoah.org/users/Isabela

12/03 2010Comments 2 notes

11/01 2010 Comments 2 notes

They say it’s better late than never.

I have been wanting to reach out to our community to give everyone more background information on Networked Organisms and Project Noah along with some updates on all the things we’ve been working on behind the scenes and today is finally that day. 

First off, just some basic housekeeping. Our company is officially called Networked Organisms and our nature-focused, citizen science application is called Project Noah. To make things more confusing, Noah is actually an acronym that stands for Networked Organisms and Habitats. All you really need to know is that the company Networked Organisms was created to help people reconnect with the planet through simple and fun technology solutions and Project Noah is our first step in that direction. 

So, who am I? Well, my name is Yasser Ansari and Networked Organisms is basically the culmination of all my life’s work thus far. It combines my past experience in the biological research lab with my more recent efforts developing new mobile technologies for large telecom companies and mixes all that with my underlying desire to help make a positive impact on the planet. 

Our ultimate goal with Project Noah is pretty simple. We want to help people learn more about their surrounding wildlife by encouraging them to document their encounters with nature. Beyond that, we have an ambitious goal of becoming THE platform for documenting all the world’s organisms and, over time, we hope to become a valuable tool to help measure “Mother Nature’s pulse”. As we start to collect more and more real-time wildlife encounters from our expanding network of global contributors, we’re basically building a system we can use to get a “status update” from Mother Nature. Whether it’s an oil spill in the Gulf Coast, polluted beaches in California, or rainforest deforestation in Brazil, our users will be on the front lines and their contributions will help us document and preserve our planet’s biodiversity.  

We are 100% dedicated to growing and improving this project and we have a bunch of exciting developments we’re working on that I will be sharing with you over the coming weeks. I’ll be giving you a sneak peek at our first Android app and our next iPhone app, a glimpse of our upcoming major web update, and some previews of other fun stuff we have in store. 

Thanks for your continued support of the project and please feel free to contact me directly with any questions, comments or ideas! yasser [at] projectnoah.org

—Yasser Ansari, Chief Leaf

9/27 2010Comments