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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Mushroom Observer is envisioned as “a living field guide for mushrooms or a collaborative mushroom field journal”. The field of mycology, the study of fungi, is an exciting one for amateur scientists because there’s so much yet to learn about these fascinating forms of life.
Participants on the Mushroom Observer site upload photos and [...]
You’ve read the news stories about the sudden declines in bee populations in the United States; the status of these important pollinators should be of interest to anyone who’s interested in…well, eating!
The Great Sunflower Project seeks to learn about the status of bees, and asks you to watch and record bees that visit sunflowers grown [...]
Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) is an organization at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which engages in citizen science watershed monitoring AND helps other groups start their own programs.
Their monitoring of Pennsylvania waterways resulted in detailed databases on pH and alkalinity in Pennsylvania streams. They’ve also created watershed atlases depicting land use, population [...]
There’s an incredible amount of citizen science being done by local groups, people who are involved in doing environmental research in their communities. I tend to not cover those groups much here; it feels, frankly, overwhelming…but I need to start, because the projects I usually post about here are really the tip of the iceberg.
One [...]
One of the reasons I’ve been slack about posting here is that my interest in food production, cooking, and eating issues has been on an upswing…and there’s not time to do it all. But sometimes these interests overlap, as they did while I was searching the web for information about how to raise our [...]
The All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) for Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an attempt to catalog all of the species found within Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Scientists and volunteers are collaborating and expect to find over 100,000 species, and have even discovered hundreds of species new to science (mostly insects and [...]
Did you know that earthworms are not native to the Great Lakes region? Glaciers left the area worm-free over 10,000 years ago, and the worms found there now are mostly exotics native to Europe, brought by settlers. AND these exotics have a dramatice impact on forest ecology.
Great Lakes Worm Watch works to [...]
