Today is Earth Day, a perfect excuse to get out and help the planet!

Researchers need YOUR help tracking the presence of American robins, so they can compare your observations with other environmental data, including climate and weather changes.  American robins are arriving in the Colorado Rockies 14 days earlier than they did 30 years ago and have been spotted in parts of Alaska for the first time. Because robins consume a wide variety of foods, an increase or decrease in their population may indicate (or impact) changes in other animal and plant species. It’s time for you to get involved and help the planet!

All you have to do:

1. Spot a robin
2. Record the date and location
3. Take note of its activity (what is it doing? what is it eating? is it near other birds?)
4. Share your results

This project is part the Changing Planet series, presented by the National Science Foundation, NBC News, Discover Magazine, Science For Citizens and Planet Forward. Changing Planet” is a series of three televised Town Hall meetings, hosted by Tom Brokaw of NBC News, on what climate change means. The first event, held at Yale, airs on the Weather Channel tonight at 8pm ET. We’ll also post the video here on Monday, April 25.

Here are four other awesome projects to start on Earth Day:

	Earth Day Photo and Essay Contest: Celebrate Earth Day with middle school students (grades 5-8) across the country by taking a photograph of something changing in your local environment. Then, research and write an essay about the photograph. The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies will award a variety of prizes, including a digital camera, digital photo frame and digital photo keychain, and more. Send in your pictures by April 29, 2011!
	Sound Around You: Help researchers build a sound map of the world as part of a study into how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel. Just use your mobile phone (or other recording device) to record 10 to 15 second clips from different sound environments, or “soundscapes” – anything from the inside of a family car to a busy shopping center. Then, upload the clips to a virtual map!
	Cloned Plants Project: Plant a lilac and contribute to a phenology monitoring project over 50 years in existence! Participants plant a lilac clone and record observations of recurring life cycle stages such as leafing and flowering on the USA National Phenology Network webpage. Observations of cloned plants help predict crop yields and bloom dates of other species, control insects and disease, and assist with monitoring the impact of global climate change.
	BeeSpotter: Get out there with your camera and capture some good pictures of bees! Researchers need your help better understand bee demographics in the state of Illinois. You’ll help BeeSpotter researchers establish a baseline for monitoring bee population declines and learn about bees in the process.

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You’re invited to join Science for Citizens at the Philadelphia Science Festival Carnival on the Ben Franklin Parkway this Saturday, April 16!

The festival promises to be an event like no other, with over 80 exhibitors offering non-stop family-friendly experiments, interactive activities, games, and a packed line-up of live entertainment. Best of all, the event is free, open to all ages, and requires absolutely no pre-registration.

The Science for Citizens team will be there to host our own exhibit (Booth 62), featuring two different opportunities for you to participate in hands-on scientific research. Come and join the fun. We hope to see you this weekend!

Researchers need YOUR help tracking the presence of American robins, so they can compare your observations with other environmental data. If you spot a robin at the festival, record the time and note its activity. Then visit our booth to log your data. The person who logs the most robin sightings wins a prize!

Did you know that you can contribute to science by blowing bubbles? It’s true! We’ll be creating our very own “bubble cones” and launching bubbles into the air. Then, you’ll  simply record in which direction and how far the bubbles travel.  All of this data will be submitted to the Open Air Laboratory in support their larger effort to study how obstacles in our environment affect the speed and direction of wind around us.

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Energy is a strange thing.  It floats around you, fills you up until you’re about ready to burst, and then it skips off, leaving you to keep up as best you can.  Last Thursday and Friday were two full days of such energy, when 60 professionals from such exotic places as Alaska, Colombia and New Jersey got together to discuss why and how public participation in scientific research (PPSR) is necessary if we are to save the world’s biodiversity.  The amazing thing about this workshop wasn’t so much that these people had a similar goal (after all, who doesn’t want to save the world?), but rather that the participants brought such a diversity of backgrounds, academic disciplines and institutions to the table.

Although the participation of citizens in scientific research goes back centuries, it is only very recently that there has been a push and pull from many different areas, leading to an amazing expansion of this kind of research and a demand for new ideas, ways to engage, and methods to understand how and why this can ultimately lead us forward in conservation.  The 50+ projects that were represented during this workshop illustrated this expansion not only by what they had in common – citizen engagement, data collection, and links to better conservation management – but also by what they didn’t.  While some projects, like FrogWatch USA or Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, invite participants from across the United States to collect data on a wide geographical scale, other projects such as Ndee bini’ bida’ilzaahi (Pictures of Apache Land) and the Fresno Bird Count are place-specific, uniquely adapted to the needs of their local community and natural environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, discovered the strange green "voorwerp" (Dutch for "object") in 2007. (Photo: NASA)

What does it mean to think scientifically?

If you asked me this question when I first moved back to New York three years ago, I’m quite positive I would have said something like, “What do I know? I’m not a scientist,” and pointed the questioner in the direction of the nearest pocket-protecting nerd in the vicinity.

Science was never one of my best subjects (I can still remember my high school physics teacher, Dr. Moroni, speeding out of the parking lot in his Pontiac Aztek to avoid telling me that I had failed the final exam). In fact, it was the very last thing I thought I would get involved in upon settling into my artsy Brooklyn neighborhood in 2008 to write my first novel. However, since my discovery of citizen science through the Earthwatch Institute and WildMetro, I now consider myself an unofficial member of the super hip NYC science community, whose events on such sexy topics as the dark matter and neuroscience are more likely to be full of trendy 30-somethings sipping beer out of plastic cups than pale, lab coat wearing individuals with microscope indentations around their eyes.

To begin a journey into the realm of the scientific mind, let’s go back in time about 177 years ago, when the word “scientist” first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. Before this transitional moment in human history, people we would now think of as scientists were called “natural philosophers” – those who studied the workings of nature. Some of these philosophers, such as Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Michael Faraday, had little formal training in their chosen subjects, but came to learn about science through a personal desire to come up with answers to their individual questions about the universe. Science was less a profession or an academic field as it was a way of thinking about the world and understanding its mysteries through direct observation.

In some ways, the study of science was more accessible two hundred years ago than it is in today’s science classrooms, where students are typically tested on their ability to remember the answers to hundreds of questions that have already been answered, rather than being encouraged to look up at the sky or at a blade of grass and come up with questions of their own.

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Anne will be starting a Ph.D. this fall to study citizen science as a tool for conservation.

Ponder for a moment this quote written by Aldo Leopold in the late 1940s:

“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, or otherwise have faith in.”

Food for thought, especially if you are a citizen scientist like I am. And even more so if you are a citizen scientist who cares about the environment and believes deep down that citizen science just may save the planet. But who am I to come up with such crazy theories? Hmm, I suppose this calls for an introduction…

My name is Anne, La Señorita Toomey, citizen science aficionado and lover of all things natural. I’m so into citizen science that I’m actually embarking upon a Ph.D. program in the fall to study citizen science as a tool for conservation in one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, Madidi National Park in Bolivia. In the meantime, I’m spending my days – and some insomnia-ridden nights – thinking about how and why citizen science is likely to become the most important discovery for the environmental movement in the 21st century.

With the promise of solar energy, hydrogen-powered cars, and molecule transporters (okay, so that last one is on my fantasy wish list), citizen science may sound like a hokey solution to the incredible array of environmental challenges we are currently facing. But if we look deeper into the meanings of science and citizenship, we realize that encouraging non-experts to participate in the building of knowledge about how our world works may have profound implications for the way we, as a global community, will relate to our natural environment.

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As record levels of snow blanket much of the United States this year, Science For Citizens is collaborating with an important climate research project at the University of Waterloo called Snow Tweets. We’re pleased that this is the first of many scientific projects that you’ll be able to do on Science for Citizens.

To help researchers track climate change, we’re requesting that you find a ruler, put on a warm coat, go outside, and measure the depth of snow wherever you happen to be. And then report the depth to us right here. That’s all there is to it! You’re simple action will help the planet. Your data will advance climate science, and you’ll get to see your depth report appear on our world map of snow tweets.

To help you get started, we put together this “How To” video complete with some empirical evidence from your fellow citizen scientists. Enjoy, and please share wildly on your social network of choice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below, I’ve listed the top 10 Science for Citizen blog posts according to the number of visits. Thanks for joining our journey in our inaugural year. Wait until you hear what we’ve got cooking for 2011!

Happy New Year from the Sci4Cits team!

10. The hummingbird versus Godzilla–on video!

To fans of hummingbirds and “nature cams,” Phoebe Allens needs no introduction. She’s an intrepid little momma bird whose adventures in nurturing her young have been well documented by a Web cam pointed at her nest in a rose bush in Orange County, California. This spring, Phoebe bravely defended her nest from a lizard several times her size. She then removed a damaged egg so that it wouldn’t attract any more attackers.

9. What makes a good citizen science project–for you?

Before attending a panel discussion at the conference, ”Earth and Space Science: Making Connections in Education and Public Outreach,” Michael asked readers  about what makes a citizen science project successful for them. how important is it that you increase your own scientific knowledge as part of the project? How important is it that you contribute to scientific knowledge? Is it important to you that you do more than collect data?

8. Help needed: monarch butterflies in trouble

Monarch butterflies need our help! The regal butterflies, hit hard by the torrential February rains in Mexico, are at their lowest population levels since 1975, according to Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas. The storms killed 50 to 60 percent of the breeding colonies in northern Mexico; the butterfly population was already diminished by unfavorable conditions last summer.

7. Don’t know a chickadee from a warbler? There’s an app for that!
Looking for a convenient way to identify birds during your next citizen science excursion? Consider the WildLab Bird iPhone app, which uses photographs, audio, and maps to help you determine which bird you’ve spotted and makes it easy to share the observation with researchers at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. It’s wild!

6. Tracking Jellyfish around the globe

Have you seen a Jellyfish on a family vacation or on your yearly deep-sea fishing trip? JellyWatch is a new citizen science project that aims to create a database of jellyfish sightings across the globe. Just snap a picture if you can, and visit JellyWatch to record your sighting. If you went to the beach but didn’t see any jellyfish, that data can be used as well. And, the study is looking at more than just jellyfish — sightings of red tide, squid, or other unusual marine life will help build a long-term database that can be accessed and further developed by schools, policy makers, and the general public.

5. Spot the jellyfish – here or in Malta

One thing about Science for Citizens readers: they love Jellyfish! As this little guy (in the thumbnail) peers through a jellyfish on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, hundreds of citizen scientists are recording their jelly observations on the Mediterranean island of Malta. By reporting jellyfish that swim close to shore and identifying them using the project’s online guide, participants not only increase the public’s awareness about the types of jellyfish around Malta but also help others, as the site says, “avoid those stinging jellies!”

4. 10 back-to-school projects for citizen scientists

To keep young minds entertained as well as enlightened, we recommended 10 back-to-school projects for student citizen scientists. Teachers and parents, please note: Many of these programs provide materials around which you can build lessons. And there are lots more where these came from. Visit our Project Finder for a full list of citizen science projects for primary and secondary school students.

3. Picture Post: the art of citizen science
Sometimes, science is the happy companion of art. 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.	>

2. Citizen science goes to the beach

As Memorial Day approached  and Americans slide into summer vacation, we mixed up a little surf and science cocktail for the lazy summer days ahead. Here are half a dozen citizen science projects you can participate in while at or near the beach. To find more watery science to do this summer, browse through the Ocean and Water category in our Project Finder. If you’d like to recommend other ocean-based projects,

1. A university for citizen scientists

Bard College, a liberal-arts school in New York state, is hoping to foster a lifelong interest in science with its new “Citizen Science Program,” a three-week intensive regimen required of all first-year students. The course, ready to roll in January 2011, aims to give all Bard’s freshmen in-depth exposure to scientific problem solving. Congrats to our blogger, Liz, for crafting the most popular blog post of the year!

Which citizen science projects in our Project Finder were the most visited in 2010? Check out the top 10! Is your favorite on this list? If not, tell us about your favorite citizen science project(s) on your very own (free) member blog!

10. Foldit: Solve Protein Puzzles for Science

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. Researchers are collecting data to find out if humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, researchers can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!

9. REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project
Keep track of the fish you see while scuba diving or snorkeling, and submit those observations to an online database. You can start anytime, with or without a training class, as long as you can POSITIVELY identify the fish you see. This is a worldwide program for Pacific Coast, Tropical Eastern Pacific, Tropical Western Atlantic, Hawaii, and northeast U.S. and Canada.

8. Project Squirrel

Project Squirrel is calling all citizen scientists to count the number of squirrels in their neighborhoods and report their findings. The goal is to understand urban squirrel biology, including everything from squirrels to migratory birds, nocturnal mammals, and secretive reptiles and amphibians. To gain data on squirrel populations across the United States, citizen scientists will also be asked, when possible, to distinguish between two different types of tree squirrels – gray and fox. Anyone can participate in Project Squirrel!

7. Moon Zoo
Moon Zoo invites you to help astronomers count and analyze craters and boulders on the surface of the moon. You will examine images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which show the lunar surface in remarkable detail, including features as small as about one and a half feet across. While exploring the lunar surface, who knows what else you might find.

6. Texas Bee Watchers: 52 Gardens, 52 Weeks

Texas Bee Watchers aims to increase awareness and knowledge of native bees in Texas. In 2010, the Bee Watchers are challenging Texans to plant 52 Bee Gardens in 52 Weeks. To watch native bees, you only need to find some blooming plants. Once you see these hard-working insects, you may want to try catching a few native bees with a net, cooling them down in an ice chest, and looking at them close-up. Or maybe you’ll want to practice your photo skills and photograph them? Sounds fun? It is!

5. Sound Around You Project

The Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford is building a sound map of the world as part of a new study into how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel. They’re asking people across the world to use their mobile phones (or another audio recording device if their phone is not compatible) to record 10 to 15 second clips from different sound environments, or “soundscapes”–anything from the inside of a family car to a busy shopping center. Then, volunteers upload the clips to a virtual map, along with their opinions of the sounds and why they chose to record those particular sounds.

4. Stardust@Home

Join Stardust@Home in the search for interstellar dust!  On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft’s sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust’s dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004; and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away. Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth!

3. Gravestone Project

Help researchers map the location of graveyards around the globe and then use marble gravestones in those graveyards to measure the weathering rate of marble at that location. The weathering rates of gravestones are an indication of changes in the acidity of rainfall between locations and over time. The acidity is affected by air pollution and other factors, and could be used as a measure of changes in climate and pollution levels.

2. Firefly Watch

Firefly Watch combines an annual summer evening ritual with scientific research. Boston’s Museum of Science has teamed up with researchers from Tufts University and Fitchburg State College to track the fate of these amazing insects. With your help, the project aims to learn about the geographic distribution of fireflies and their activity during the summer season. Fireflies also may be affected by human-made light and pesticides in lawns, so researchers hope to also learn more about those effects.

1. Laser Harp: Build It Yourself

Tech musician Stephen Hobley’s laser harp was the most popular project in our Project Finder. After building your laser harp, you’ll coax out the computer-generated sounds by waving your hands to break the light beams and change their lengths. We first found out about Stephone’s harp in recent issue of Make magazine that was devoted to build-them-yourself, high-tech musical instruments. Sounds awesome, huh?

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to plant three trees during a Casey Trees community tree planting event in Washington, D.C.  On that freezing cold December morning, I got to thinking: how do trees survive the winter months? Is there anything can we do to make it easier for them?

Well, it turns out that caring for trees is indeed a year-round commitment, including winter months. The steps we take now will help ensure that trees will be around for years to come. There are several opportunities to help researchers monitor and protect trees: Urban Forest Map, TreeWatch, The Great Yew Tree Hunt, Seward Park Hemlock Tree Monitoring and other projects listed in the Science For Citizens Project Finder.

If you’re a tree lover, Casey Trees just released its Winter Almanac, which provides some great tips to ensure that your trees are healthy and ready to flourish this spring.

The almanac includes information on the importance of inspecting for broken branches, how frequently to water trees, how to protect them from pesky deer, and when to prune. Check it out and good luck winterizing your trees!

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Keep scientists at IceWatch up to date about the snow and ice in a lake near you! Photo: David Shelly

Now that half the country is blanketed in snow for the holidays, we wanted to point out a cool new project to join: IceWatch USA!

As a child in the woods of New Hampshire, my siblings and I kept a keen eye on the weather, and “ice on” events at our back pond were a major cause for celebration. Once ice had crept across the whole pond (and swamp), we’d start our annual pestering ritual in an effort to get Dad out there to check the ice thickness. The instant he gave his ok, we’d jam on our skates and zoom across.

Curious citizen scientists who live near a body of water (lake, pond, stream, river, estuary, or bay) are encouraged to join IceWatch and send in observations of their own “ice events.” Researchers at IceWatch want to know whether or not your body of water is covered in ice (and how much is covered) as well as what date the ice appears and disappears. For extra credit, send in reports of snow depth, air temperature and wildlife observations.

To become an IceWatcher, register online and choose your waterbody of interest. Reporters can send in observations by email or snail mail (and simple point-and-click online reporting is in the works). Your data will be aggregated with observations from fellow IceWatchers and shared with interested scientists.

In addition to the impact on budding hockey stars, changes in “ice on” and “ice off” events can alter migration and breeding patterns of birds as well as food supplies for other animals. Your icy observations will help scientists investigate how our climate is changing and how ecosystems react to these changes. Information about our changing world is particularly important for climate scientists as they strive to accurately model future weather patterns.