Citizen Science Projects

Herbaria@home is a project in the UK that uses citizen scientists to help identify the undocumented plant samples held by museums and universities:

Volunteers working for the web-based herbarium@home project have reached a milestone with the digitization of their 50 000th herbarium sheet. Working in partnership with museums and universities, the citizen science project aims to unlock the information from herbarium collections hidden away at museums and universities. Herbarium specimens represent an important record of changes in biodiversity and land use over the past 250 years. Some of the Victorian collections worked on have lain untouched for decades.

Working from images of herbarium specimens uploaded to the project website (http://herbariumathome.org), volunteers transcribe the details from each plant specimen into an online database. This controversial approach to museum documentation which effectively hands control of documentation to volunteers outside of museums has proved successful and project is now regarded as a model for crowd-sourcing museum documentation.

The herbarium@home project is supported by the Botanical Society of British Isles. The data collected from the project is freely shared.

Link: Herbaria@home

Our friends at the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO, which we blogged way back in 2004) have a newer project, Citizen Sky:

We are seeking to understand a star that has been a mystery to scientists for many years. This star is epsilon Aurigae, a very interesting, very bright star located in the constellation Auriga, the charioteer. This star is bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye even in the most light-polluted cities, and it is visible every fall, winter, and spring.

Epsilon Aurigae is a variable star—this means it changes in brightness over time. Collecting data on these changes can help us understand the star. There are many types of variables – epsilon Aurigae is an eclipsing variable. (We have a whole page dedicated to more information about epsilon Aurigae, the “star” of our project). The change in brightness that this star undergoes is called an eclipse (a process of fading and coming back to its usual brightness.) This process takes over 600 days. One of the things that makes epsilon Aurigae so interesting is that it only has an eclipse once every 27.1 years.

Some things about the way that this star fades and then regains it brightness are still not fully understood by astronomers after over 175 years of study. The next eclipse of eps Aur is predicted to begin in August 2009. We need you to help us collect data so that we can better understand this mysterious star. Because the star is very bright, it can be observed by anyone regardless of background, training, or equipment: with just good pair of eyes and a finder chart (which we will give you) you can monitor this eclipse.

The eclipse is approaching totality – some models predicted “second contact” to occur on December 19, but observations are showing that some of the assumptions used in that model may be incorrect. Read more about that here. Clearly, it’s an exciting time for this project, and there’s still plenty of time for you to participate!

Link: Citizen Sky

The nice folks at Paw-Talk have posted an interview with me about citizen science and my evolving interest in animals and wildlife. (Their introduction certainly makes me blush!) I enjoyed talking about some of those connections, my experiences as a citizen scientist, and mentors I’ve looked up to as a child and as an adult.

Link: Selfless Science and Bird Watching

I’ve been hoping for a good paleontology project, and here it is: The Open
Dinosaur Project:

The ODP (Open Dinosaur Project) is a collaborative research effort, focused on developing a comprehensive database of limb bone measurements for dinosaurs. By collaborative, we truly mean it – anyone is allowed to contribute to the database. We will focus on measurements in the literature as well as “original” measurements taken directly from specimens. For Phase I of the project, we will use the data to look at patterns of limb bone evolution in ornithischian dinosaurs, and how it relates to the evolution of locomotion in this group. Preliminary results and analyses will be blogged at this website, and all participants will be included as junior authors on the resulting scientific paper, unless they request otherwise.

Visit their FAQ page for lots of juicy details. They’re hoping to finish data collection for Phase one of the project by February 1, 2010, so you’ll want to join soon to get in on the first round of study.

Link: The Open Dinosaur Project

The Global Classroom Project is an education-oriented project that teaches students about the water cycle and about making and recording observations:

The Global Classroom Project is a unique, global, research project, where children will become scientist during 10 days. 300 schools from countries such as USA, China, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, South America, Bolivia, Egypt, Spain, Germany, Australia, Great Britain, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden will be invited to participate in one of the world’s largest scientific projects for children. In 10 days from the 28. September to the 7. October 2009, all the children’s homes will be transformed to scientific measuring stations. We are going to measure the rainfall in more than a thousand different places around the world. The children should measure the amount of rain every day with the same discipline as if they were scientists and afterwards they should put their results up on the project’s web page. Here it will be possible for the children to compare their results with the other children – both with the children that they go to school with and the children from the schools around the world.

I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to post this before the observations were being made for this round.

This project is managed by Danfoss Universe, a science theme park in Denmark.

Link: The Global Classroom Project

The BBC News describes a promising new application for data collection via mobile phones in the article, Mobile app sees science go global.

The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles – on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species – in a web-based database.

The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones.

The approach is outlined in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. [Here's that article]

The software has been developed for so-called smartphones that run Google’s Android open-source operating system.

Researchers can report back to the EpiCollect database with results from experiments they do in the field, and “citizen scientists” can send back photos or videos of certain species from their own backyards.

The phones’ GPS system automatically logs users’ locations, and the data is then plotted by location using Google Maps. Then anyone can access the database online, or from their phone.

The “home” for EpiCollect appears to be on SpatialEpidemiology.net. Also be sure to check out the original source article, EpiCollect: Linking Smartphones to Web Applications for Epidemiology, Ecology and Community Data Collection.

Links:
Mobile app sees science go global from BBC News
EpiCollect: Linking Smartphones to Web Applications for Epidemiology, Ecology and Community Data Collection

CureTogether, the volunteer collaboration project where participants report on their own medical symptoms, is reporting that they’ve confirmed a link between self-reported infertility and asthma. Here’s some excerpts from their press release:

Patients at CureTogether who report infertility are 1.9x more likely to report having asthma than patients who don’t report infertility.

This comes from an analysis of 324 patients. Within the 34 people reporting infertility, 13 (38%) reported having asthma (the remaining 21 out of 34 specifically said they did NOT have asthma). Within the 290 people reporting “no infertility”, 58 (20%) reported having asthma (the remaining 232 specifically reported NOT having asthma).

This 38% vs. 20% relative risk is statistically significant, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.4 – 2.6.

The importance of this finding is that using only self-reported data, we have confirmed the infertility-asthma association that has previously been explored only in clinical studies:

1. Asthma was found to be associated with irregular menstruation. http://thorax.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/60/6/445

2. Asthma is higher in women with endometriosis (which also has a high correlation to infertility) than in the general population. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/10/2715

3. The more siblings you have, the less likely you are to have asthma. http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/56/3/209

4. A big cohort study in the UK found no link between fertility and allergy-related diseases but also said that with asthma in particular there was a different relationship to fertility than with eczema and hay fever. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/165/9/1023#FIG1

The announcement was made yesterday at the Mayo Clinic Transforming Healthcare Symposium. You can see the presentation made by Alexandra Carmichael by visiting the symposium web site. In the videos at the top, scroll down to the fourth presentation by Carmichael, which is also an excellent overview of the CureTogether and The Quantified Self efforts.

Links:
CureTogether
The Quantified Self

The folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have been hard at work on their Citizen Science Central web site. Be sure to check it out!

Be sure to check out the Toolkit for folks wanting to get a citizen science project of their own started, and a new section devoted to global climate change and related projects.

There’s some great stuff, and I hear that there are big plans for even more!

Link: Citizen Science Central

The Maryland Science Center has a several terrific citizen science programs in the earth sciences:

Earth by Aura: participants take daily UV radiation readings, make the data available online through the Society for Amateur Scientists, and compare daily readings with predicted readings from various weather services and satellites.

Citizens and Remote Sensing Observational Network (CARSON): participants make a variety of observations that are uploaded to LabRats. “Participants will be asked to monitor basic Earth indicators according to what is of most interest to you. Examples of possible environmental parameters to measure include visibility, air ozone levels, air quality index, nitrogen levels in local stream, etc. Participants will get detailed information on how to take these measurements and how it relates to environmental health as a whole.” Participants can also attend monthly meetings for citizen scientists.

Communicating Climate Change (C3): participants collect temperature or phenological data on forms that are submitted at the end of the year. The program includes a free training session to get people started with the program.

What I especially like about Maryland Science Center’s programs is the support they offer in the local community, with in-person meetings and training sessions. Great stuff!

Link: Maryland Science Center: Citizen Science

Eyes of the Reef Network is a project that encourages reporting of changes in the sensitive ecosystem of Hawaii’s reefs:

The Eyes of the Reef Network was developed to increase public awareness and engage communities in the monitoring and reporting of coral bleaching and disease, marine invasive species and Crown-of-Thorn Sea Star (COTS) outbreaks. The statewide network is the first tier of a rapid response protocol developed by the Division of Aquatic Resources and the Climate Change and Marine Disease Local Action Strategy, implemented by Reef Check Hawai‘i. The Eyes of the Reef network is comprised of regular reef users (including recreational users, tourism professionals, researchers, and fishers) who voluntarily monitor and report on conditions at reefs that they visit regularly.

The project is from Reef Check Hawaii, which organizes several ocean monitoring projects.

Link: Eyes of the Reef Network