Seaquer

Introducing Seaquer: Notice Yourself. Notice Your Environment. Seaquer is a set of free to use apps, generative AI infrastructure and data hosting service which has been developed to enable and encourage us to notice and record our feelings about the green spaces in our local communities - keeping a diary as we do - and then convert those recordings into hyper-local eco news and data. Generating the initial nature records – ‘Vibing’ in Seaquer - has the side-effect, perhaps, of also helping to look after the mental health of ourselves and our closest friends and family – perhaps the reason we use a green space in the first place. No, it won't be for everyone. And we're not trying to build a new tool for environmental campaigning. But we are creating something that could energise those campaigns - when they are needed to protect local, green spaces - with news and data. And that could help all those responsible for managing our green, community spaces with a better, richer understanding of what people notice. And value. Protecting Our Spaces. Protecting Ourselves. The UK is covered with tens of thousands of local, community ‘Green Spaces’. From un-maintained patches of grass to small nature reserves looked after on a best-endeavours, voluntary basis to maintained and managed parks, golf courses, sports facilities and heritage grounds. And then there are the conservation areas or back-to-back sets of gardens which have developed, by chance and natural effort, their own 'micro ecologies. When the ecological health and quality of any of these community green, semi-green or ‘wildlife rich’ residential spaces are damaged or when maintenance decisions fall out of sync of what people value, the impact can be deeply, viscerally felt by the people who use or live in them or nearby. But too often we only recognise how much we valued a living thing, a green space or our local ecology when the damage is done and it's gone forever. The first step in protecting our green spaces is to genuinely notice them: too often, we don't. We take the birdsong, the wildlife, plants and the whole environment for granted. We assume it will always be as it is. The second step is to take what we notice and turn it into data which can be used, when necessary, to protect a space - or just to make better, daily, maintenance decisions. It's easier to argue for conservation when you have analysis proving the need for it. It's easier to make better maintenance decision with richer data. And the third step is to regularly analyse the data and, if things are changing, highlight and communicate those changes – rapidly. Seaquer provides an infrastructure and set of user apps to help make these steps happen. Finding Peace in a Vibe A Seaquer Vibe is the equivalent of a tweet or post – it’s a record of something you’ve noticed and is made up of a ‘Mood’ or reaction to what you’ve seen or heard, a location – where you noticed it - and an image and/or sound recording and/or question or note. When your post your Vibe, Seaquer uses a range of different machine learning engines to extract data: if you’ve recorded Birdsong, Seaquer will tell you what birds; if you photograph a flower, Seaquer will tell you what flower. And if you’ve asked a question, Seaquer will try to answer the question. Every week, all of the data extracted from Vibes which creators have chosen to share is also fed back into Generative AI engines to produce ‘Space Reflections’: what are people noticing in a specific area or space - what’s new, what stands out. This is Seaquer Eco-News. The combined data is also via the App – Vibe maps with analysis of plants, animals, birds, insects and moods. Seaquer will tell you where to find Blackbirds or Burdock and how that is changing over time. If litter is an issue, Seaquer will tell you which brand names and materials are seen most often. We hope to welcome you to the Vibing Community soon. Thanks for reading and good vibes!