Christine Goforth is an entomology Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the aquatic insects of the Sonoran Desert, especially the parental care behaviors of the giant water bugs and using aquatic insects to indicate and manage water quality issues in Arizona.

In July of 2009, a friend and I arrived at a lake to collect water samples for work. We had worked at the lake many times, but something was different that day: several hundred dragonflies were flying over the grass.

We often saw dragonflies, but there were 50 times the usual number and they weren’t in their usual places. We knew something exciting was happening, so we jotted down notes. I returned to the lake twice to record more observations of the swarm and simply appreciate the marvel of nature that I witnessed. Then they were gone.

That experience changed me. I am an aquatic entomologist with an interest in dragonfly behavior, but that swarm captured my attention like nothing else. I needed to know more about it! I looked into the scientific literature to find answers, but discovered that little is known about dragonfly swarms.

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AP Photo/Mike Groll

Nice shout-out from the Associated Press this weekend:

Once restricted mainly to counting birds – most famously, in Audubon’s 111-year-old Christmas Bird Count – citizen science has expanded rapidly in recent years, both in number and variety of projects. Some projects count things – fireflies, ladybugs, frogs, herring. Others record data on water quality, weather, flower budding and other phenomena. Still others already have the data but need a lot of people to sort through it.

Darlene Cavalier, whose ScienceforCitizens website brings together volunteers and research projects, said she started the site when she was a graduate student writing a thesis on promoting citizen science. The site’s growth from a blog listing about 40 projects in 2006 to a busy portal with more than 400 projects in its database today mirrors the expansion of citizen science in the US, Cavalier said.

“My goal is to get as many people as possible involved in citizen science projects,” said Cavalier.

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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 »

This is National Invasive Species Awareness Week!

Invasive species represent a significant threat to native plants, animals, and humans. They cause enormous disruptions in the natural ecological balance, inducing erosion, crowding out food sources, and reducing biodiversity. Invasive species are also a significant drain on the national economy.

If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area today through March 4, you can register for a week full of free activities, briefings, and events to highlight what is being done around the world to stop and slow the spread of invasive species. You can also follow the action on Facebook.

Not in the DC area? Thanks to citizen science, there are still plenty of ways to play an active role in National Invasive Species Awareness Week. Here are some easy and fun citizen science projects that you can do:

What’s Invasive: use a mobile phone to locate invasive plants in locations across the US or create your own list of plants that you want help in locating.

University of Florida Cuban Treefrog Citizen Science Project: capture and remove invasive treefrogs around your homes, collect and submit data on these frogs, and monitor for native treefrogs.

Global Garlic Mustard Field Survey: help scientists gather data on the abundance and distribution of an invasive plant called “garlic mustard” (scientific name: Alliaria petiolata).

Read the rest of this entry »

Below, I’ve listed the top 5 Science For Citizens member blog posts according to the number of visits received. It’s easy to start your very own Sci4Ctis member blog. Start sharing your adventures with other citizen scientists!

5. Rent a Remote-Controlled Telescope! From Michael
It’s pretty hard to be an amateur astronomer without your own telescope–or is it? Michael blogs about the Global Rent-a-Scope network, which lets would-be star gazers rent time on various “robotic telescopes” around the world. As a member, you can control these telescopes from the comfort of your home via the Internet and download images of the planets, stars, and galaxies you observe.

4. Collecting Data, Revising Hypothesis From Don
Data collected by citizen science groups can often provide the information scientists need to answer a question. However, just as often, the data provides the scientist with information the scientist wasn’t expecting, causing a rethinking of their hypothesis. This happened recently with the data collected by volunteers of the Firefly Watch Citizen Science Project.

3. Calling Worm Rangers! From GLWW

The Great Lakes Worm Watch’s 3rd Annual “Big Worm Week” was a free opportunity for all ages, youth to adult, to raise awareness and understanding of exotic earthworms. Participants learned how to conduct earthworm surveys and contribute to this growing citizen science effort. This was an important event because there is very little data collected on invasive earthworm species in the Great Lakes region.

2.The New Rugged Individualism From reinventor32

What is “open education”? Bennett describes it as the conscious and willful act of spreading knowledge and experience to others, helping others (especially younger people) to gain an appreciation and love for learning, and a desire to partner with and help educators especially in subjects relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Read more to find out what happens when we connect enthusiasm to the scientific process.

1. National Geographic Kids – November 2010 From Charlotte
Our most popular member blog post of 2010 belongs to Charlotte, who blogged about her favorite articles from the November edition of National Geographic Kids. Thanks Charlotte, and we look forward to more blog posts from you in the future!

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!

Science for Citizens is getting some attention over at Motherboard.TV, an online video network. Co-founder Michael Gold and I were interviewed by Jordan Keenan of Motherboard this past spring at Harvard during the Humanity Plus Summit where I spoke about citizen science. Here are the slides from that presentation. You’re welcome to them.

In the following interview, recently published on Motherboard, Michael and I banter about the demographics and motivations of our favorite peeps: citizen scientists. Hope you enjoy it!

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.

On the list of reasons to watch The Rachel Maddow Show, one wouldn’t ordinarily expect to find “lessons in ornithology” near the top. Well, after Monday night’s show, that’s exactly what viewers got!

In the video clip below, Maddow explains how she was recently walking her dog in a western Massachusetts forest when she heard a bird song that she didn’t recognize. She immediately whipped out her smartphone and recorded part of the song. She then played the song on the air and challenged her audience to identify the bird.

(Ten points if you can correctly guess the bird before reading the rest of this blog post!)

Over the next day, hundreds of people provided their answers on the Maddow Blog and the show’s Facebook Fan Page. Many of the answers seemed reasonable (e.g., a chickadee), while others were wildly ridiculous (e.g., “her Blackberry running low on batteries”) or simply too offensive for me to repeat in a public forum.

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A few days ago, Bruce Lewenstein, Professor of Science Communication at Cornell University, sent this note to me:

I’ve just returned from several weeks in China, where I was giving lectures on science communication at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ graduate school and in other venues.  A story about the lectures ran in the science section of the Beijing News and was reposted on the news.163.com site – and the accompanying photo features the URL for scienceforcitizens.net!  Thought you might enjoy it.

We sure did! Thanks, Bruce.

We’re in good company pictured alongside Cornell’s site.

To our new friends in China and abroad: we invite you to add your citizen science projects to the ScienceForCitizens.net project finder.

My Chinese tutor, Mr. Brian, was kind enough to provide a  translation of the Beijing News article: Read the rest of this entry »