Publix GreenWise Market Magazine - December 2008
Citizen Scientists
Environmental studies aren¿t just for the pros. Do try this at home.
 Three times in the first half of this year, 45-year-old Juli Buchanan stood in the dark by the side of a rural Georgia road and listened.
“I waited until it got really quiet,” she says. Then she cocked her head and, with a friend by her side, listened for the frog and toad calls she had learned to recognize from a CD. How many types were calling, and how constant were their calls?
Buchanan, a college senior based in Gainesville, Georgia, was participating in the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program (NAAMP), a project coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor populations of vocal amphibians. “It’s so exciting to hear these frogs whose calls you’ve been studying, to hear them out in the wild,” she says.
Science for amateurs
NAAMP (pwrc.usgs.gov/naamp) is just one of many environmental collaborations of scientists and volunteers, who are known in research parlance as citizen scientists. The programs draw hundreds of thousands of volunteers throughout the United States who help scientists acquire information about the natural world and monitor environmental trends in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
“With citizen science, you can address questions at a scale that no university research team would begin to be able to do,” says Janis Dickinson, Ph.D., director of citizen science at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. The volunteers get great satisfaction from taking part, often finding new ways to connect with nature. Plus, “it’s fun!” says Giff Beaton, a pilot from Marietta, Georgia, who has participated in the National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) for almost 30 years.
Christmas bird-watchers
The CBC (audubon.org/bird/cbc) is how citizen science first began back in 1900. Director Geoff LeBaron explains, “There had been a Christmas Day tradition at the end of the 19th century called a side hunt, in which teams competed to see which one could shoot the most birds.” As part of the budding conservation movement, an ornithologist proposed people count birds on Christmas Day instead of hunting them. A tradition was born.
Today there are more than 50,000 bird-watchers who spend a winter day between December 14 and January 5 counting birds. The volunteers—be they beginning birders or old hands like Beaton—go out in observation parties and report the number of birds and species they observe. The National Audubon Society uses the data collected to monitor trends and intervene when necessary. |
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Frog whisperers
The NAAMP has had similar efforts under way since 2001. “Worldwide, we’re seeing declines in some amphibian populations,” says coordinator Linda Weir. “Amphibians may be important indicators of environmental health. And without the data that volunteers collect, we wouldn’t be able to monitor changes or have information on which to base decisions.”
She is impressed with the diversity of volunteers the program attracts. “We have everyone from schoolteachers and people who work in a nonbiology field all the way up to Ph.D. scientists,” Weir says.
Backyard scientists
While many citizen science projects engage people who love exploring nature far and wide, there are other projects ideal for those who prefer to stay close to home. Cornell Lab of Ornithology conducts several that allow volunteers to observe from the comfort of their own backyards, including the Great Backyard Bird Count (www.birdsource.org/gbbc), Project FeederWatch (feederwatch.org) and Celebrate Urban Birds (celebrateurbanbirds.org).
Likewise, the Great Sunflower Project (greatsunflower.org) enlists people to plant sunflowers—in a patio pot, backyard, school yard or community garden—in an effort to better understand the problems that are decimating bee populations worldwide.
“We just don’t have enough data on what’s happening to honeybees and other pollinators,” notes project director Gretchen LeBuhn, Ph.D., an associate professor of biology at San Francisco State University. Once the sunflowers have blossomed, participants can pull up a chair and time how long it takes for five bees to visit. (“If it takes more than half an hour, you just quit,” LeBuhn says.) The data, collected during the summer months, are submitted online. At press time, more than 35,000 people had already signed up to take part in 2008.
Doing what you can
For volunteers like Juli Buchanan, citizen science is a way to contribute to the environmental movement and to protect the Earth she holds so dear. “I’m not a person to get out there with a protest sign,” she says. “But collecting data is something I can do.”
Collect Data on the Web
To learn more about citizen science in general, as well as specific environmental projects, check out these sites:
- The Great Annual Fish Count tracks fish populations and monitors marine environments (fishcount.org).
- Alabama Water Watch monitors that state’s lakes, streams and coast (https://aww.auburn.edu).
- Project BudBurst collects data on the timing of plant leafing and budding in order to track climate change (windows.ucar.edu /citizen_science/budburst).
- Citizen Science Central is a clearinghouse of information on citizen science initiatives (birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit).
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