Published June 15, 2010

The effort to find and rescue oil-soaked birds is too enormous for overtaxed and undertrained crews in the Gulf of Mexico.

MoGO (Mobile Gulf Observatory) is a new iPhone app created by UMass Amherst wildlife biolgists.

That’s why wildlife biologists at UMass Amherst are tapping the power of the crowd. A new iPhone app aims to create an army of “citizen scientists” by allowing people to snap and submit photos of animals in distress.

It’s called MoGO, for Mobile Gulf Observatory, and I just grabbed the free download (iTunes link). It’s dead simple: Select the animal (birds, sea turtles, marine mammals, fishes, seashore creatures) or the blight (tarballs, oil slicks, oiled habitats). Then take a photo. Then choose one: Alive, Injured, Dead. The photo is geotagged and submitted to the Wildlife Hotline, as well as a database the researchers are using to track the disaster.

The idea came to Charlie Schweik, the press release says, “as he listened to yet another depressing story about the Gulf oil spill.” Schweik, associate director of the National Center for Digital Government, turned to his colleagues at UMass to reach out to the fisheries and wildlife community.

UMass Amherst wildlife biologist Curt Griffin is our guest today on Radio Boston.

Meanwhile, the folks at eBird.org are mapping observations of endangered animals with the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Bird Tracker.