I’d like to invite Christmas Bird Count participants to add their photos to the Flickr pool we created last year. Photos of birds are great, but we also love photos of birders and some of the other sights from the day.
Here’s a slideshow of the photos in the pool so far:
Flickr is a photo sharing service from Yahoo! that I highly recommend. And any photo you add to the Christmas Bird Count group can also be added to the Citizen Science group!
Here’s an extremely promising online application for tracking health information of many types, particularly for people with conditions like diabetes, depression, cancer, and many, many others:
CureTogether is a place where patients and researchers work together, doing open research to find cures. Patients can start feeling better today by connecting, sharing resources, and tracking their health. It’s as private as you want it to be, it’s free, and the aggregate data is open so researchers around the world can collaborate on it. Together we can make discoveries and work toward ending suffering for millions of people living with chronic conditions.
One of the founders of CureTogether, Alexandra Carmichael, makes a great case for the project on Kevin Kelly’s “Quantified Self” weblog:
We launched in July as a way to bring patients with 3 chronic conditions together to share their symptoms and treatments with each other and contribute their data to crowdsourced health research. It quickly expanded to 148 conditions, all suggested by members. It’s amazing to me to see people checking off symptoms and treatments they’ve experienced and tried, keeping daily Twitter-like logs of their health, and starting to track basic things like weight, sleep, caloric intake, and exercise.
You can bet I’m joining this project. It will be interesting to see if I can keep up with posting to it. Visit CureTogether.
Bird Atlases are important reference works that map the presence of bird species in greater detail than you’ll find on the maps in your field guide. They are necessarily local efforts. The San Diego Natural History Museum Bird Atlas has completed its data collection and initial publication phases…a massive effort by citizen scientists:
The project was an effort of epic proportions, guided by Curator of Birds and Mammals Phil Unitt, but depending on the enthusiastic participation of over 400 trained volunteers throughout the county, an extremely biodiverse area covering 4,200 square miles. These citizen scientists spent a total of over 55,000 hours searching for, observing, recording, and documenting San Diego County’s birds, represented by some 499 species altogether. The project spanned 6 years from 1997 to 2003, and the resulting voluminous body of information as summarized in the 645-page San Diego County Bird Atlas led Phil Unitt to state that “the birds of San Diego County are now among the best known in the world.” The Atlas has already provided critical information for conservation decisions made in the County, but much broader impacts are noted by one reviewer, who sees the area in regard to habitat conservation planning as a “robust microcosm of California and the entire nation.”
And, wow, do I love that the data is also available in Google Earth!
The printed work can be purchased on Amazon.com
The San Diego Natural History Museum has a number of citizen science projects that Delle Willett has pointed us to. The first up is the San Diego County Plant Atlas:
The San Diego County Plant Atlas project was created by the San Diego Natural History Museum to scientifically document the remarkable floristic diversity of San Diego by initiating the collection of voucher plant specimens and field data throughout the county. Over 600 citizen scientists (”parabotanists”) have participated in a novel program that trains them how to collect specimens and submit field data online. With this concentrated effort 225 new county records have been documented, and despite the recent drought, over 37,000 specimens have been collected and added to the new database. The county, which is a rich source of floristic surprises, can claim three more native plants this year. Two of the discoveries are native North American plants not previously known in California, and one is a fern new to science. The Plant Atlas is designed to complement the Museum’s county-wide Bird Atlas and Mammal Atlas projects and is providing more accurate and detailed geographic information on the flora of San Diego County for science, education, the interested public, and land managers.
This sounds like a fantastic opportunity to learn more about local plants while doing citizen science, and the training sounds really fun…not to mention the chance to tell people that you’re a “parabotanist”! I wish this was closer to home for me, but if you’re in the San Diego area, check it out.
Tomorrow, we’ll feature another citizen science project from the San Diego Natural History Museum.
Spacehack is a terrific new directory of projects where you can participate in space exploration and connect with the space community.
Spacehack categorizes projects as competition, data analysis, education, and open source. Some examples of projects include:
And many more…check out Spacehack for the full directory, or to submit new ones.
Here’s a fantastic class that happening in the San Francisco Bay Area that you’ll want to attend if you’re interested in ecological monitoring:
Basins of Relations: Starting and Sustaining Watershed Groups. It’s being taught by Brock Dolman, a fantastic instructor who will keep you entertained, engaged, enlightened and inspired:
This four-day intensive residential training is designed to promote and support the creation of North Coast community-based watershed groups. This training is specifically designed for teams of three to four residents, with each team representing a local watershed. You will learn about watershed processes, salmonid ecology, water quality monitoring, in-stream restoration, biotechnical engineering, uplands erosion control, road restoration, native habitat restoration, sustainable forestry, community group process, and funding opportunities for watershed groups. Your team will develop a watershed group formation plan during the training and commit to facilitating the creation of a community-based group in your home watershed. Enrollment is limited and subject to an application process intended to select committed watershed-based teams.
To give you a taste, here’s Brock on native grasses and their interrelations with grazing, soil building, and watershed:
The class is a fantastic deal: $200 - 500 sliding scale, which includes meals and lodging at the beautiful Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. But it starts starts next Friday, December 5, so you’ll need to call to sign up soon! To register, contact Brock Dolman at (707) 874-1557 ext. 206.
Reader Laura MacFarland from the River Alliance of Wisconsin writes with this question:
The River Alliance of Wisconsin is hoping to establish a new citizen scientist monitoring project statewide in partnership with the National Institute of Invasive Species Science (using CitSci.org) and our Department of Natural Resources. We are interested in raising awareness of invasive species in river corridors, early detection, and engaging citizens control. To date I cannot find anyone who is using citizen scientists to monitor riverine invasives (submergent, emergent and wetland plants and invertebrates). I am looking for examples of protocols. I have posted this question to several river oriented listservs to no avail. Do you think the readers of your blog might be able to help?
How about it? Anyone out there have any ideas for where Laura might find an appropriate protocol for this? Answer in the comments, and we’ll make sure the info gets passed along!
I’m excited to be a guest blogger on Science Cheerleader, with a post there titled Getting back to our roots as everyday scientists: Permaculture.
I’ve been contemplating the connection between citizen science and permaculture ever since returning from the permaculture design certification course I took this summer. The similarities seemed so clear; both include grass-roots (sometimes literally!) movements, foster a deeper connection to nature, and encourage exploration and experimentation. The more I contemplated it, the more I realized that permaculture helps get us back to our ancestral roots as everyday scientists. AND it has interesting implications to everything from tracking to rehabilitating our disastrous current food systems.
I’d love to hear what you think; you’ll find the post on Science Cheerleader, and the full essay is right here: Permaculture, Citizen Science, and the Opportunities for Sustainable Food Production.
I’m excited to see a new project in the making, The Great Influenza Experiment. This is the first project I’ve seen in health and medicine that’s organized around traditional citizen science concepts, and I definitely expect to see more.
From their About page:
The Great Influenza Experiment is a proof of concept project that we believe will demonstrate that networks of individuals can accurately predict influenza activity. We are inspired by two similar and powerful concepts – Web 2.0 and Citizen Science. Web 2.0 applications such as Wikipedia and Craigslist allow individuals new, powerful ways to communicate and share massive amounts of information across the internet. Citizen Science projects such as the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count or the Canadian NatureWatch programs recruit community volunteers to assist in large scientific surveillance endeavors. Both concepts employ the power of the masses for the public welfare. With the help of community volunteers we hope to provide a needed, community based influenza surveillance system.
It’s exciting to see this effort, and I’m especially intrigued by the use of Facebook. We’ll keep an eye on this for sure!
Science isn’t just about collecting data; it’s also about taking a critical look at the way data is collected to understand what legitimate conclusions can be drawn. With the rise of automated data gathering, we might expect to see more projects where the citizen scientist role is one of vetting the data rather than collecting it directly.
S’COOL Rover from NASA is just such a project. An offshoot of a the S’COOL educational outreach program for grades K–12, S’COOL observers make cloud observations while a NASA CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) satellite is passing over their location. The data is used by scientists to help validate the CERES measurements. Because data from CERES is used to help understand the relationship between solar energy and cloud cover, it’s an important part of work being done to understand changes in our climate.
It’s easy to determine the time a satellite will be passing overhead using a simple web form. And like any good project, S’COOL Rover shares your work back, allowing you to view and browse the data that’s been collected.
S’COOL Rover looks like an interesting, easy, and worthwhile project. I’d love to see an automated alarm system to alert you to a satellite’s approach…it might be just the thing to get desk slaves outside for at least a short break during the day!
