Seriously, I want to know what you think makes for a great citizen science experience.

On November 2, I’m giving at talk at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America on the topic “Citizen Science from the Citizen’s Point of View.” In large part, that talk will focus on the feedback we’ve gotten from you, both in response to an informal survey we conducted in 2009 and in response to Michael’s post in July.

You’ve told us, for example, that the top two reasons you participate in citizen science activities are to help safeguard or improve the environment and to learn more about a subject. You’ve also said that, from your point of view, the most important requirements of a project are that it provide feedback to the participants and that you get to see the final results, knowing that you had a hand in them.

This is great information that will help scientists as they create and shape citizen science projects–and will help us as we work with scientists and with you.

Now, I’d like to push things a little farther. This week, I’m interviewing volunteers for projects such as Citizen Sky and ClimateWatch more specifically about what they like and don’t like about their citizen science experiences. I’m hoping to hear, for example, that the best part was the chance to ask a researcher questions directly or that the worst part was having to cope with a balky website to enter data. You know–real specifics.

Won’t you to chime in as well? Think about the projects you’ve taken part in and consider these questions:

• What’s an example of the most enjoyable part of your experience?
• What has been least interesting or enjoyable?
• Did you have interaction with the scientists themselves? Is that important to you?
• Did you have interactions with fellow participants? Is that important to you?
• Did anything surprise you about the research itself, the organization of the project, or your fellow participants?
• What did the project organizers do to keep you involved and informed? Is there anything they could have done more of, or done differently to keep you involved?

Please include your thoughts in a comment below. I’ll post after November 2 to let you know how the talk went and report on the meeting.

Thanks for adding to the discussion!

Artist's rendering shows massive star epsilon Aurigae and its mysterious companion. Credit: NASA

There’s a mystery in the night sky that you can help solve.

Every 27 years, in the constellation called Auriga (the charioteer), a bright star designated epsilon goes dim for nearly two years. Epsilon Aurigae is a “binary eclipsing variable star,” which is astronomer-speak for a star that appears to change brightness as an orbiting companion body periodically passes by, “eclipsing” and blocking the primary star’s light. The most recent eclipse of epsilon Aurigae started in August 2009 and will continue into next summer.

The mystery, which has baffled astronomers since the binary system was first noted in 1821, is this: What exactly is epsilon Aurigae’s companion? The companion gives off no light at all, and, to add to the mystery, epsilon Aurigae seems to brighten slightly in the middle of its two-year eclipse. All of this has led researchers to propose that the companion is a “transparent shell star” or a thin disk of material with a gap in the center. Or maybe two smaller stars in the midst of a disk of matter. So far, they just don’t know what it is.

What astronomers need in order to solve the puzzle is many, many more eyes to watch epsilon Aurigae as it fades and brightens. Naked eyes, to be exact, because the star is too bright for most telescopes. Such observations, carefully analyzed, can reveal the masses, sizes, and orientations of the star and its companion—all details that help clarify the architecture of the binary system.

So, last year, the American Association of Variable Star Observers started a citizen science effort to recruit those eyeballs. Called Citizen Sky, the project now has about 2,000 registered volunteers; to date, the few hundred most active have contributed 3,785 observations of the current eclipse.

Citizen Sky creator Aaron Price says collaboration and communication are key to a project's success. Credit: G. Damave

Though still new, the results are promising, says project creator and AAVSO assistant director Aaron Price: “So far we have a beautiful light curve of the epsilon Aurigae eclipse that has helped professionals build a better model for the system causing the eclipse.”

Price and the rest of folks behind Citizen Sky take their volunteers very seriously. Participants train on a 10-star tutorial to get started on data collection and analysis. They are encouraged to develop their own research questions and to form teams, with the help of a professional, to address those hypotheses. And they have been invited to attend workshops, put on by the project leaders, on binary-star science and on data analysis and writing research papers. Through a blog, forums, chat, and newsletters, volunteers keep in touch with each other and with the scientists. “Part of our core mission is to engage participants in every stage of the scientific process–not just data collection,” says Price.

In fact, Price, who is a PhD candidate in science education at Tufts, is writing his dissertation on the impact of the project on the participants’ science literacy. One surprising result, he says: “Collaboration and communication between participants is key.”

Soon, Citizen Sky will have another tool for educating citizen scientists. Guustaaf Damave, an astronomy buff and filmmaker based in Washington state, is putting the finishing touches on an hour-long documentary about the project. It’s called, appropriately, “Mystery in the Sky.”

Amateur astronomer Alice Few is an active member of Citizen Sky. Credit: G. Damave

Like the Citizen Sky organizers, Damave takes the long view, using the film to explore not only the project, but the science of binary star systems and the scientific method itself. In addition to the science leaders of Citizen Sky, such as lead scientist and Denver University astronomer Robert Stencel, the film features volunteer Alice Few, an astronomy podcaster and member of the Tacoma Astronomical Society. “Ultimately, it’s for all the citizen scientists out there,” says Damave.

And all you citizen scientists out there can help make sure the film is released. Damave is asking for contributions to help finish and distribute the DVD, which he plans to sell on Amazon. He needs a total of $1,600 in pledges by October 2 to fund his effort. As of today, he has $1,205. Anyone who pledges $15 receives a copy of the film.

So consider lending your eyeballs to Citizen Sky and a few dollars to the film that will help spread the word.

Amateur scientist of the year, Ruth Brooks, and her test subjects. Photo: BBC

Ruth Brooks, a gardener with a soft spot for snails, has just won the BBC’s “So You Want to Be a Scientist?” contest. You may recall that she was our favorite when we reported in April on the four finalists for the contest.

Brooks’s ground-breaking (if slow) project showed that, contrary to what many scientists thought but gardeners suspected, snails have a homing instinct. The clever mollusks, she found, will return to their home gardens even if they’ve been relocated 100 feet away.

Brooks was helped in her research by Dave Hodgson, an ecologist at Exeter University, who described the experimental plan in this video:

Brooks has not yet determined the maximum limits of snails’ homing range, but, according to the BBC, she had this to offer gardeners who can’t bear to murder the creatures:

“I would say that on the evidence that it would be safe to take your snails away beyond 100m [330 feet] or further and put them somewhere nice with some food and you can be almost certain that they won’t come back.” She added: “I shall certainly be following that advice.”

You can follow Brooks’s continuing experiments on Facebook. And let us know–do her adventures spark any science project ideas for you? Add your comments here.

Water testing in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo:WWMD

On Saturday, September 18, citizen scientists from Virginia to Hawaii will dip jars into rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, and the ocean, and perform simple tests to measure the quality of their local waters. It’s all part of World Water Monitoring Day, an annual international event designed to raise awareness about the need to protect our water resources.

You can join in! It’s simple: Choose a waterway you’d like to test and register it on the World Water Monitoring Day site. While on the site, you can buy a test kit or find out how to make your own. The tests, which include checking the water’s clarity and acidity, are easy. Once you’ve got your data, be sure to report it on the site; the results that citizen scientists collect are published there each year.

And if you can’t make the event on Saturday, you can still participate–the project accepts reports until December 31. Who knows, you might decide to become a dedicated water monitor, like those valiant volunteers who collect data all year round for environmental agencies and researchers.

In case you do catch the water-monitoring bug, check the “oceans and water” category of our Project Finder for an effort near you. Here are some we’ve added in the last few months:

• Yuba River Water Quality Monitoring
• Jug Bay Macroinvertebrate Sampling
• Central Wisconsin Riverkeepers
• Florida LAKEWATCH
• Colorado River Watch Network
• Seward Park Water Chemistry Monitoring

In Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, art reveals science.

Sometimes, science is the happy companion of art.

Take Spiral Jetty, a piece by the late sculptor Robert Smithson. In 1970, Smithson arranged 6,650 tons of basalt boulders into a spiral that reaches 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. Built during a drought, the stony coil soon disappeared beneath the lake’s rising, algae-reddened waters. Drought revealed the artwork once more in 2002 and again in spring 2010; its rise and fall clearly traces the changing climate.

Or consider Richard Misrach’s photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge. Taken over three years from the same spot on the porch of his Berkeley, California, house, they form a succinct record of light and weather. Similarly, artist Mark Klett created dramatic evidence of how time has altered the Western landscape when he re-photographed more than 100 geographic survey views, a century after the images were first taken. And don’t forget the year’s worth of atmospheric phenomena that Ken Murphy recently collected with his camera on the roof of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

And sometimes, art is the happy byproduct of science, as in the citizen-science effort known as Picture Post. This project wants you to do like Richard Misrach: Take photographs of the same place over a period of time, monitoring how the landscape and vegetation change.

It’s really that simple. Participants drive a wood or plastic post into the ground, then rest a digital camera on top and take an eight-shot panorama of the surrounding landscape, plus a photo of the sky directly overhead.

A Picture Post and its "habitat" in Maine.

You can set up a post to monitor the seasons in your backyard; you can choose a place that’s undergoing rapid change, such as a suburban development; you can track the natural rhythms of a preserve or park. You can team up with a school or community group or nature group that wants to “adopt” a post. The idea is to return to the post and repeat the photo sequence once every week or two throughout a season or a year, uploading your photos to the Picture Post site.  The result is a systematic document of  environmental change.

And, if you will, some very cool art. Take a look at some of the photo sequences on the site: seasons rush by, the landscape blooms and subsides, water rushes in and ebbs away.

The project organizers—Jeff Beaudry of the University of Southern Maine, Annette Schloss at the University of New Hampshire, John Pickle at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, and Fabio Carrera at Worcester Polytechnic Institute—have so far set up about 30 posts in the Northeastern United States and one in Italy. They could use a lot more, so sign up now! Do some science, make some art.

If you like Phoebe Allens, the famous Allen’s hummingbird whose comings and goings are video-recorded in a southern California yard, then you should know about The Animal Detector.

The Animal Detector is a video blog devoted to the nocturnal critters that visit the backyard of University of North Carolina developmental biologist Bob Goldstein.

One night a couple of years ago, Goldstein’s toddler son asked for a piece of cheese to leave outside for animals. The next day, the cheese had of course disappeared—but who had taken it?

To find out, Goldstein and his son rigged up an infrared-sensitive light and a motion-sensing webcam, left some pet-food “bait” in view of the lens, and went to bed. And, voilà, the next morning, they had a video of a cat stopping by for a late-night snack.

Since then, the Animal Detector has recorded the nighttime visits of birds, possums, raccoons, squirrels, a fox, and even a human (a neighbor kid; he didn’t take the bait).

Time-lapse image of the flightpaths of two pelicans. Credit: Bob Goldstein

And the Detector has branched out: Goldstein’s rig monitored a robin’s nest for three weeks, capturing the hatching, feeding, and fledging of its occupants. One week, the Detector went to the beach and recorded the flights of seagulls and pelicans. The time-lapse results, processed into a single image, are works of art.

There’s lots more to see on the blog. If you want to create your own Animal Detector, consult Goldstein’s plans, published in the February 2009 Make magazine. And let us know if you do—it would make a great post for your Member Blog. I’m definitely going to set one up.

A folded-up protein.

The child you scold for spending so much time on World of Warcraft? That kid could turn out to be a biochemist’s dream.

According to University of Washington researchers who run an online game—sorry—an online science project called Foldit, players can beat computer algorithms at solving one of science’s toughest problems: How to fold a protein.

Proteins, which are composed of long strings of amino acids, won’t work properly unless they are balled up in a stable 3D shape. There are thousands of ways a given protein can fold, but only one structure that allows the protein to function. Knowing a protein’s shape is critical to understanding the processes it’s involved in and to designing new drugs. Until recently, scientists simply allowed computer software to chug along endlessly, working out likely possibilities for each protein’s shape.

But in 2008, Seth Cooper, David Baker, and others at the University of Washington decided to see if citizen scientists could do better than computers. They created Foldit, a multiplayer online game that pits volunteers against each other to see who can manipulate proteins into their most stable configuration.

Foldit has all the perks and prods of any good online game: a point system, skill levels, chat rooms, wikis, and tools with names like “shake,” “wiggle,” and “rubber band.” The “game” takes advantage of three traits humans have and computers lack: superior spatial awareness, the willingness to take short-term risks for long-term gains, and the ability to recognize a dead-end. So far, more than 57,000 human folders have joined in.

And it looks like they’re winning. In a recent study, the Washington researchers matched the players against the state-of-the-art protein-folding computer program, testing them on 10 proteins whose structures were known but had not been made public. The top-ranked gamers bested the software in five cases, matched it in three, and lost only twice. Unlike the computer, the players took risks, temporarily de-stabilizing the protein in order to end up with a better structure.

On August 5, the gamers scored in a different kind of game when Nature published the researchers’ report about the protein-folders’ prowess. At the end of the list of authors, there they were: “Foldit players.”

On the radio today: California Academy of Sciences' Bay Area Ant Survey

“Everybody have ants?”

That’s Kelly Herbinson, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences, training high school students in the art of collecting ants for the Bay Area Ant Survey, one of the Academy’s citizen science projects. (You’ll find a description in our Project Finder.)

The project and the problem ant that participants most often encounter–the invasive Argentine ant–were the subject of a radio story today by our friends at Quest, a science program produced by the San Francisco public radio affiliate KQED.

According to the report, the tiny black Argentine ant, originally brought to this country in coffee shipments during the 1890s, has created one enormous colony that stretches from Oregon to Mexico. That’s a lot of ants! The Argentine ants have pushed out native ants, caused problems with crops, and led to the decline of the coast horned lizard, which eats only native ants. But now, as Lauren Sommer reports, researcher Neil Tsutsui at the University of California at Berkeley is working to develop chemicals based on the ants’ natural pheromones that will trigger aggressive behavior and cause the ants to turn on each other. (Listen to the full story.)

Bay Area citizen scientists can help by contributing to the Academy’s Ant Survey. Ants collected by participants are identified, and their identity and location are added to AntWeb, a visual database of the world’s10,000 species of ants. So far, more than 800 citizen scientists have collected 34 different species of ants in the region. Everybody got ants?

One of the many jewels in San Francisco’s crown is the Exploratorium, a hands-on museum where creativity and science collide in ever more imaginative ways. And among the imaginative projects the museum has backed recently is artist-programmer-musician Ken Murphy’s film, A History of the Sky.

Murphy, an Exploratorium artist in residence, is creating a time-lapse film of the sky for an entire year. Last July 28, he placed an old 4-megapixel Canon camera with a wide-angle lens on the roof of the museum and hooked it up to a computer. Since then, he’s recorded a photo of the sky every 10 seconds. The camera will stay atop the museum until July 28 this year.

To make the film, Murphy assembles each 24-hour collection of images into a six-minute movie at 24 frames per second. Eventually, he will collect each day-long movie into a projected grid of 365 movies—an entire year of the sky!

For Murphy the programmer, it’s been a real DIY science project. “I’ve learned a lot out of necessity,” he says, “such as building enclosures that can stand up to the elements and how to keep a camera running 24 hours a day, every day, all year.”

The video at the top of this post covers 42 days. On Murphy’s project site, you can also see a 126-day movie and learn how he built his system. Oh, and you can also support this very cool project with a donation.

Murphy is still looking for a home for his piece. “Ideally,” he says, “I’d like to set it up somewhere where the camera can continually capture images and update the display every day, so that it will be an ever-evolving history of recent atmospheric phenomena.”

Go on—do your own impromptu weather study as you watch the gorgeous cloud and wind patterns unfold. You’ve never seen the sky like this before.

The mission blue butterfly is back home in San Francisco, thanks to science volunteers. (photo by the National Park Service)

One of the loveliest butterflies in the San Francisco Bay Area is the mission blue. Hikers who venture south of the city to San Bruno Mountain or north to the Marin Headlands are sometimes lucky enough to encounter the iridescent, inch-wide insect (as I did a couple of weekends ago).

But the butterfly, an endangered species since 1976, has all but disappeared from the city itself, mostly because development and El Nino-related storms have wiped out the lupine flowers it needs to survive.

Now, with the help of volunteers, lupines and the butterfly have been restored to the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco.

Over the last several years, volunteers and staff with the city Recreation and Parks department’s Natural Areas Program collected lupine seed from San Bruno Mountain and planted it on Twin Peaks, returning repeatedly to nurture the lupines and clear away non-native plants that would have choked out the flowers. Last year, after deciding the lupines were firmly established, the city got permission from the feds to capture pregnant mission blues on San Bruno Mountain and transport them to Twin Peaks. Just a few weeks ago, naturalists swarmed Twin Peaks to check for this year’s offspring, and there they were—thriving mission blue butterflies, back at home.

Here’s to all the science volunteers who make time to tend our planet!