SANDSNAP – BUILDING A BEACH GRAIN SIZE DATABASE WITH CITIZEN SCIENCE

Citizen science offers opportunities to strengthen relationships between researchers and local communities, increase data collection, and increase transparency in the scientific process. Over the last decade the opportunities to include non-scientists in research have expanded as improvements in mobile technology have allowed data collection without specialized equipment. Smartphones have essentially placed a computer and high-resolution camera in everyone’s pocket.

SandSnap is a citizen science program intended to create a more robust coastal sediment grain size database and include coastal communities in the process of managing their beaches. Grain size is needed to model sediment transport, but the data is often lacking. SandSnap allows beach visitors to contribute to the sediment database by just collecting a photo. After the user uploads the image, it is analyzed with SediNet, a machine learning model, to quantify the grain size distribution. The results are returned to the contributor, usually ~2 minutes, and shared publicly on the SandSnap website (https://sandsnap-erdcchl.hub.arcgis.com/). A comparison between physical and SandSnap samples shows a mean absolute error of 22.4%. To date (12/3/2024), 2,310 images have been successfully processed. Samples have been submitted from 49 countries, but 76% of the submissions are from the United States.

Community involvement is critical to the success of any citizen science program. The SandSnap team has reached out to multiple communities for support. We have worked with other coastal professionals, college students, K-12 teachers/students, Girl Scouts, Fire Island National Seashore, and local libraries. The SandSnap team has hosted citizen science events for Girl Scouts and created “Discovery Bags” to be checked out from local libraries. We have also created lesson plans for K-12 teachers and posted ideas for science fair projects using SandSnap data. Public engagement along with technical refinements is an ongoing SandSnap effort. Participation in professional coastal themes conferences has resulted in a robust peer-network that has been critical to SandSnap’s success.