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Everyday citizens can now contribute to thousands of research projects around the world.
Nearly every spring and fall for the last four years, Leon Vinci and his partner have picked up their supplies, met at a parking lot off Apperson Road and waded into a branch of the Roanoke River.
There, they slip a mesh net into the stream to search for tiny river bugs, some no larger than a fingernail. They count and categorize their catch, measure the pH of the water, make observations about the water’s level and its clarity. After half a day spent in the sunshine and fresh air, the team files a report to the Roanoke River Project. Their work as stream monitors is complete for another season.
Unlike many volunteer activities — picking up litter or beautifying a garden bed, tutoring a student or raising awareness of homelessness — the value of the stream monitoring isn’t in the work itself so much as its contribution to a larger pool of information. After years of collecting data, city, county and state agencies can see trends in the health of the rivers they’re watching. They can use the measurements to devise policy and create clean-up plans. The data are available for researchers to include in a variety of undertakings.
Which is what makes Vinci not just a volunteer, but a citizen scientist.
It’s a classification that is both hundreds of years old and relatively new. Think Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity or John James Audubon’s study of birds. Neither were trained scientists. They were simply observers, curious about the world around them.
Today’s citizen scientists are participants in typically large-scale studies, designed by researchers to count species, gather data on soil or water, document changes in the natural world over time. They are crowdsourced using apps on phones and uploaded into multinational databases. Citizen science projects range from observing the night skies to monitoring weather conditions to tracking the level of plastics in the ocean.
While the work has been happening for centuries, the term “citizen science” has only been widely used in the last 10 years. Driven by scientists’ desire to make research more available to everyone and the public’s concern over the health of the environment, and aided by advances in technology that make measurements more precise and communication easier, citizen science today includes thousands of studies at the local, statewide, national and international levels.
In the Roanoke region, citizen scientists participate in bumblebee and firefly counts. They listen to frog calls and monitor bluebird boxes. They report changing weather conditions. And document plants and animals along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Roanoke River Project currently has 47 stream monitors and is regularly training new folks to check area waterways. The City of Roanoke recently undertook an urban heat island study as one of only 13 cities in the nation chosen to participate in the research. (See sidebar.)
But as varied as the citizen science projects around the world might be, they have one thing in common: They tap in to people’s desire to make a difference.
“Our volunteers are always asking: ‘What can I do?’” says Mary Ann Brenchick, Clean Valley Council’s executive director. “People want to do more. And they want to have meaningful work to do.”
Citizen science explodes
When experts reach back to pinpoint the beginnings of citizen science as we know it today, they land on a National Audubon Society project from 1987. It was called the Citizens’ Acid Rain Monitoring Network and it had all the ingredients for citizen science success: volunteers from around the country contributing data that was easy to obtain and, taken together, exposed an undeniable truth.
Some 280 volunteers collected rain and/or snow samples over the course of a year. The conclusions were so uniform, over such a wide swath of the nation, that less than three years after the study began, federal legislators strengthened the Clean Air Act, limiting the amount of pollution allowed in the atmosphere.
“That’s the beauty of citizen science,” says Vinci, who spent his career at the intersection of environmental and public health and, in addition to his work with Clean Valley Council, serves as a co-chairman for citizen science for the National Environmental Monitoring Conference’s annual meeting. “You have this international web of volunteers and you can now get a bigger picture of what’s happening on the planet.”
Other early citizen projects include the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, begun in 1900 and continued every year since; the founding of the American Association of Variable Star Observers in 1911 and its call for amateur astronomers to contribute to scientific research; and monarch butterfly monitoring, which has utilized trained volunteers since the 1950s.
But it wasn’t until the twenty-teens that the scientific community fully embraced citizen science and technology opened the door to a wide range of projects.
“The field of citizen science has really exploded in the last decade or so,” says Michelle Prysby, director of the Virginia Master Naturalist program, who has been involved in citizen science for 25 years — ever since her graduate school work inaugurating the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, which still continues today.
In 2013, the Citizen Science Association was founded. CSA is a nonprofit whose goals include connecting organizations conducting citizen science projects, furthering the conversation around citizen science and raising the standards of citizen science projects, according to its website. In 2014, the Oxford American Dictionary first included the term “citizen science” in its pages. And in 2016, the US federal government passed The Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act, which encouraged the use of citizen science in governmental agencies and research.
Closer to home, the Virginia Master Naturalist program was begun in 2005 with one of its core goals being to train and support citizen scientists. As of 2019, the Virginia Master Naturalist program hosted 30 chapters across the commonwealth. VMN’s 3,369 members together logged 65,083 hours of citizen science that year.
“People are interested in lifelong learning and they’re interested in making a contribution,” Prysby says.
The basic ideals of citizen science include: allowing scientists to accomplish tasks too expensive or time consuming to complete any other way; opening the scientific community to a wide variety of voices and ideas; increasing community understanding and awareness of science; and empowering the curious to make a difference.
There are challenges, to be sure: designing a project where citizens can meaningfully be involved; providing necessary training for citizen scientists; understanding the limits and potential biases of the data collected; and gathering needed funding for projects. “Working with volunteers is not free,” Prysby reminds.
But the biggest reason why citizen science is on the rise is because it works.
“By actively engaging people, scientists can raise public awareness and get people excited about research,” Prysby says.
How to be a citizen scientist
In 2010, a Virginia Master Naturalist chapter opened in Roanoke and Sharon Vest was one of the first to sign up for training.
Over the years, Vest has searched for snails and millipedes in forest leaf litter, collected seeds of native plants along the Blue Ridge Parkway, sent mason bee boxes to the University of Virginia, identified backyard birds at her feeder, catalogued arrowheads and counted wild turkeys.
For the last several years, especially after she retired in 2013, she’s logged around 100 hours a year as a certified master naturalist— most of them for citizen science projects.
“I’m learning something new and helping the environment,” she explains. “I’m doing something I like while helping other citizens of Virginia.”
Becoming a master naturalist is hardly the only way to participate in a citizen science project. Often museums such as the Virginia Tech Museum of Geosciences or Virginia Museum of Natural History put volunteers to work on citizen science projects. Many community groups such as the Nature Conservancy or the Appalachian Mountain Club can connect people with citizen science work.
The easiest way to become a citizen scientist, though, is to log on to a website or download an app, such as iNaturalist, eBird, Zooniverse or Scistarter.org.
In those online communities, participants can select projects that interest them. Some are more demanding than others. On iNaturalist, people can contribute simply by taking photographs of plants or bugs or birds they encounter during walks in their neighborhoods.
While some citizen science work has been put on hold during 2020’s Stay at Home orders (The Roanoke River Project’s volunteers did not monitor streams this spring), other research has provided a means for those stuck at home to contribute to science from their backyards.
Projects such as FeederWatch, mPING or The Lost Ladybug Project encourage everyone to become connected to nature nearby. Other work, such as the Smithsonian Institution’s transcription project, Zooniverse’s Penguin Watch and NASA’s Planet Four, allow participants to travel the world (or even galaxy) virtually, all while helping advance research.
In fact, this type of computer-based work is some of the most valuable right now. With the rise of animal cams and weather cams and other ways to collect massive amounts of data, researchers need humans willing to sift through the growing backlog of information.
Which proves that truly anyone can become a citizen scientist, says Vest.
“There are so many ways to do citizen science,” she says. “No matter what your interest, you’re going to find something.”
Five Citizen Science Projects to Try Right Now
Celebrate Urban Birds.
Observe birds in your backyard or neighborhood and document your findings. celebrateurbanbirds.org/cub/instructions
Track Rainfall in Your Backyard.
Record precipitation and log your data with the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. cocorahs.org
Watch for Solar Storms.
Analyze online photos from spacecraft that are monitoring the sun. scistarter.org/solar-storm-watch
Map Virginia’s Wildlife.
Upload photos that you take to document wildlife diversity (especially reptiles and amphibians) for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. inaturalist.org/projects/virginia-wildlife-mapping
Sort and Label Plant Collections.
Click through online photos from herbariums across the Southeast and update labeling to be useful to researchers. zooniverse.org/projects/md68135/notes-from-nature-southeastern-us-biodiversity
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The story above is from our September/October 2020 issue. For the full story subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!