University of Florida researchers have created a new tool to help fight the spread of pythons in the Everglades. With help from “citizen scientists” and Florida’s annual python challenge, this new tool could help agencies identify reproduction patterns in the invasive species and potentiall y curb its growth. It’s built off the app used by the python challenge, which offers hunters a $10,000 prize for capturing the most reptiles. That app catalogs the weight and location of each captured python. Private contractors hired to participate in Florida’s python elimination program run by the South Florida Water Management District also use it. “Then the side effect of that program is we record a lot of data from the surveys that they’re conducting, where they take place on the levees within the Everglades, who’s conducting them, and what time they start the search. And so that information can be used to feed these machine learning models,” said Alex Romer, a quantitative ecologist at UF. Romer uses science, math and computer programming to study nature. He’s the lead author of a study by the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences which is looking into how to use machine learning to give state agencies a way to identify the large egg-producing female pythons most likely to keep the population growing, collect data from contractors and competitors on that app and see if those metrics could coalesce into a way that more effectively curbs that growth. “It is citizen science in the fact that they are not classically trained scientists. What the contractors are doing, they have an app on their phone that actually collects their geospatial information just like any other app, something like Google Maps might do,” said Romer. Romer says the initial numbers are promising, but to really help agencies put a dent in the python population, he said there’s a lot more work to do. “What we found is the model is 44% accurate. Getting the biggest reproductive female is great, and then getting the little ones maybe isn’t as productive, but maybe it’s harder to find those bigger females that are a little more cryptic, and so if a contractor goes out and captures five small snakes and one catches one large snake, how do we determine who actually had a more effective impact on the population, and this is something that this research helps to answer,” said Romer. He’s working with two other colleagues to advance this study. Romer said it’s calibrated to the specific behaviors and biology of pythons, but added that a similar methodology may work for other invasive species like lionfish. ...read more read less