The BlueGreen open science labs provides free tools to manage and access environmental data. BlueGreen Labs is also where we develop new open source software and research ideas.

These projects consist of formal research lines, software and hardware implementations through which BlueGreen tries to give back to the open source scientific community. Our mature projects can be found on our github page. Some projects and research ideas are listed below.

Software

BlueGreen Labs develops and support various R packages. Many of these packages are a mainstay in research workflows. Most notable are the {ecwmfr}, {MODISTools} and {daymetr} packages. These packages are well documented and serve researchers worldwide.

Hardware

BlueGreen Labs develops custom hardware solutions when necessary. In order to support the scientific community some of these efforts are listed below. For custom solutions and sampling protocols within the context of these projects please contact us.

Virtual Forest

The virtual forest project provides a continuous VR experience in an experimental forest near the city of Ghent Belgium. The project takes images every half hour, presented as an immersive 360 degree sphere to be viewed on a cellphone or in your web browser. A detailed build plan of this “photosphere” can be found here.

TetraPi

Many remote sensing applications in vegetation science rely on multi-band imaging to construct vegetation indices relating to various eco-physiological processes. Although commercial cameras are available, the cost of them runs in the thousands of dollars. Here, we describe a simple multi-spectral camera (TetraPi) built around a 3D printable housing and off the shelve Raspberry pi and optical components. This puts multi-spectral imaging, for e.g. phenotying, vegetation surveys, crop & environmental monitoring, within reach of those with limited financial means. The 3D printed housing can be downloaded from Zenodo.

Support

Our time is limited and requests for help using or reproducing our projects are frequent. Where substantial intellectual input is required we ask for credit. Intellectual input can take the form of (but is not limited to) custom code, data manipulation, methodological advice (including experimental design) and editorial work outside the scope of general journal requests.

The form of credit is negotiable and depends on the exact circumstance, but can include (and is not necessarily limited to):

• Authorship on manuscripts or other research products resulting from work where we have made these contributions
• Authorship on grant proposals where applicable
• Consultancy through a service contract with one of our partners

For simple questions regarding the functioning of our open source software, or previously published work, we do not apply a consultancy policy. Simple acknowledgements and properly cited software or literature would suffice.