Passion Projects for Smart People by Michael W. Wing

Author:Michael W. Wing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Sharon Barnett’s River Otter Ecology Project is one example of many citizen science projects which are open to anyone to participate in. Citizen science projects aren’t new. The Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count has been running since the year 1900. It was originally started in response to traditional Christmas hunts, in which people would go out and shoot as many birds as they could whether they planned to eat them or not. In this survey project, you go out to a good spot for birding around Christmas, and under the supervision of a compiler you identify, count, and photograph birds according to a standard procedure. Your count is reported to the National Audubon Society. Your observations mean nothing by themselves, but they get combined with the results from tens of thousands of other volunteers around the country doing the same thing in the same year, and then the information is added to a data set that spans more than a century. That data set becomes a very powerful tool for studying and managing wild bird populations. All citizen science initiatives do essentially the same thing: recruit volunteers to make observations or measurements, standardize their procedures, and collect the results into one large data set. Digital communications have made all of this much easier, and have brought about a “golden age” for citizen science.

If you like studying birds at times other than Christmas, Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology has a number of citizen science programs. eBird, a joint project with the National Audubon Society, allows you to keep track of your own sightings and lists online, and to contribute your sightings to a real-time, globally accessible database. You can use the data to generate your own maps and graphs. Bill Schmoker, profiled in this book, participates in this project as a reviewer. In Project FeederWatch, you count birds at your own feeder, add your counts to the database, and see your data in the context of all the other thousands of feeders that have reported. For the NestWatch program, you find and monitor birds’ nests, visiting them once every three or four days and reporting on the breeding success of the parent birds. There are online bird cams, free Adopt-a-School kits for teachers, an annual four-day “Great Backyard Bird Count” in February, just before the birds begin migrating north, and a program called the YardMap Network in which you map bird habitat in your area and work to improve it.

Birds lend themselves well to citizen science initiatives because they are everywhere and because of an established tradition of bird watching in the English-speaking world. Animals are more of a challenge, but there are citizen science projects for animals, too. Many, like the river otter project described earlier, involve reporting animal sightings in your area. A couple of professors in Chicago have one, Project Squirrel, in which you actually get to experiment on wild animals.

Project Squirrel has been operating since 1997. It is a joint project, sponsored by the University of Illinois and the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

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