Meeting Abstract

91.2  Sunday, Jan. 6  Flight Artists: An outreach project that enables the general public to film natural flight using the worlds most advanced high-speed camera. LENTINK, D*; FIAZ, A.W.; Stanford University; Wageningen University; Wageningen University dlentink@stanford.edu

In 2010-2011 we developed a world-unique outreach project “Flight Artists” with a large team of scientist, students, and support staff at Wageningen University. The goal was to enable the general public to use the world’s most advanced high-speed camera , the Phantom v710, to experience the magic of natural flight in their backyard in super slow motion. After we announced the project on national TV and radio we got 800 online-applications. This idea won the Dutch Academic year prize 2010 for the best outreach idea that translates high-impact research to the general public. The award and additional university funding and sponsoring, totaling 260k+, enabled us to purchase the Phantom v710 that can film up to 7500 fps in full color, to modify it into an unique field high-speed camera, buy an additional 30 (Casio EX-F1) consumer high-speed cameras, and build-up the infrastructure to deploy our outreach project nation-wide. We developed specific course materials and weekend courses to educate 460 Dutch members of the general public how to film flying wildlife in their backyard using our high-speed cameras. After they completed the course they used our cameras to pursue their own 2-day film projects focused on their specific interest in natural flight – ranging from flying birds and bats to insects. The outreach project was highly successful resulting in overwhelming positive responses from participants, several national TV programs and world-wide media attention. The project resulted in a large open-access high-speed video library: www.flightartists.com to inspire and facilitate research and teaching in animal flight world-wide. The project is currently continued at Wageningen University and Stanford University.