From the Associated Press, this morning. It’s been printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times, USA Today and many other media outlets:

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.
Read the full story.

Mon, 09 May 2011 8:58a.m.

By Mary Esch

Environmental scientist Chris Bowser pulled a tiny shrimp-like creature from the muck in an eel trap as teenagers in chest waders surrounded him in the rushing Fall Kill, where they were collecting transparent baby eels.

“This is called a scud, or amphipod,” Bowser said, launching into a riff on the food chain and pollution.

“Are you going to eat it?” a girl interrupted.

“What? No!” Bowser snapped, then reconsidered and popped it in his mouth. “Tastes like shrimp seasoned with mud.”

Besides being a researcher in the state’s Hudson River Estuary Program, Bowser leads citizen projects that collect reams of data for scientists and resource management agencies while engaging volunteers in hands-on science and teaching them something about the world around them. His Steve Irwin-style exuberance and enthusiasm for his subject matter make Bowser an ideal leader in the rapidly expanding world of citizen science.

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. The more people learn about science and build a personal connection to research, the better they will be able to participate in policy decisions related to science and the environment, she said.

For researchers, volunteers provide free labour and are able to complete a great deal of work in a short time if there are a lot of them. Galaxy Zoo was launched in 2007 to enlist volunteers to classify photographs of a million galaxies. More than 250,000 people have participated so far, providing information used in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles.

“Professional science communities were a little wary of involving the public in the past because of trust issues and concerns about bad data,” Cavalier said. Better design of projects and new methods of weeding out bad data have overcome much of that concern, she said.

Janis Dickinson, director of citizen science at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is co-author of a book soon to be published about the lab’s highly regarded citizen science projects, which include Project FeederWatch, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and eBird, a global online tool where birders enter sightings into a massive database.

“The book is about how we can harness the internet to create conservation communities that are actually practicing data collection over huge and relevant geographic scales that really encompass the distributions of the organisms that we’re concerned about,” Dickinson said. “The internet allowed us suddenly to be able to take in data from a broad public, now globally with eBird, and then process that data and provide tools to the public so they can visualise and manipulate the data.”

As citizen science has become more sophisticated, the scientific community has embraced it, Dickinson said.

“Ten years ago when our researchers tried to publish they’d usually get a peer reviewer who was sceptical of the data,” Dickinson said. “We don’t see that any more. The research associate working in my group, who did his Ph.D. working from citizen science data, submitted a paper last August that was one of the fastest accepted I’ve ever seen.”

Bowser said researchers are becoming more accepting of volunteer-based data collection, but only if the protocols are straightforward enough and the citizens participating are trained and able to follow those protocols carefully.

“This eel project is a great model for citizen science,” Bowser said after wading ashore and leaving the students to their eel counting and water sampling. “For one thing, the species has a real demonstrated conservation need. We’ve seen a decline in American eels – in some populations 80 to 90 percent – since the 1970s, and we’re not sure why. The data we collect goes to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which wants this information.”

Volunteers like to know they’re doing something with real value, he said. They also like the fact that it requires a time commitment of just two months in the spring.

“Also, the eel has this very compelling story,” Bowser said. “They’re born in the ocean in the Sargasso Sea, then travel thousands of kilometres as baby glass eels to swim up rivers and populate the watersheds. And they’re charismatic in an underdog, Humphrey Bogart kind of way.”

“It’s good for kids to get outdoors and see what’s out there,” said 20-year-old Jorge Reyes-Bravo, who started working on the eel project when he was in high school and continues to volunteer now that he’s in community college majoring in environmental studies. “We don’t want to see species disappear. We want to figure out why they’re disappearing and help them.”

AP

Check out this terrific ad campaign from the Union of Concerned Scientists (the same organization that, in the past, has over-employed fear as a centerpiece of its messaging tactics). Here we are able to connect on a personal level to individual scientists as we learn more about their work and how it directly relates to climate change. I, for one, was drawn to this picture largely because my four young kids play baseball and, much like the child pictured here, one of them also seems “just as interested in catching butterflies” in the outfield.  Bravo UCS! (Thanks to the king of effective science communication strategies, Randy Olson , for the heads-up.)

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been asking questions about the birds and the bees. How do they fly? What do they eat? Now that I’m a trained scientist, my questions may be more sophisticated, but the passion is the same. I wonder what climate change is doing to the life cycle of wildflowers, and how bumblebees and hummingbirds are reacting to those changes. The bug’s-eye view shows me that our world is warming like never before. My name is David Inouye, and I’m a concerned scientist.
To learn more about my work, visit http://www.ucsusa.org/evidence

The careful tracking of bloom times over many years provides an important indicator of climate change. Consider volunteering to help researchers observe and record bloom times around the country by joining one of several “citizen science” projects. Learn more about these projects and how how you can get involved on SciCheer’s sister site: Science For Citizens.

While we’re talking about effective science communications, let me ask this: What do you envision when I say: “a National Academy of Engineering Communications Officer”…?

Think again. Check out this short, entertaining video starring the NAE’s communications team! It was used during last week’s Communications Conference at the National Academies as a preamble to the team’s introduction. Clever way to, again, connect to “real” people. Bye-bye-bye!

ScienceForCitizens.net, the sister site of ScienceCheerleader that matches volunteers to scientific researchers in need of some help, was among 11 companies selected by GoodCompany Ventures to help “accelerate the growth of early-stage ventures that generate profit and have a positive social impact. GoodCompany Ventures provides support, facilities, and mentoring to socially conscious entrepreneurs who can make a difference.”

My partners and I just wrapped up week one of this summer bootcamp and we’ve already learned a great deal. Totally psyched about the future of ScienceForCitzens.net!

If you’re an entrepreneur, you may want to consider checking out an incubator. Here are some of the services Good Company Ventures, for example, provides to its participants:

• Access to Infrastructure: Conference and office space as well as technology infrastructure within our facility in downtown Philadelphia.
• Access to Advisors: GoodCompany Ventures has assembled mentors, preferred providers, expert advisors, industry leaders, and start-up gurus.
• Access to Capital: GoodCompany Ventures will facilitate a first investment round by assembling representatives from leading VC firms and angel investors.

We are in “good company” here at Good Company. I hope to be able to share information about the 10 other start ups soon.

For those of you who are active members of ScienceForCitizens.net, thanks for being early adopters, thought-leaders, influencers… Huge thanks to our founding sponsor, Science House, and early partners: the USA Science and Engineering Festival, the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science, and Scientific Blogging.

We are accepting a limited number of “launch sponsorships” so if you are interested, just let me know.

In January 2009, two Red-tailed Hawks built a nest on a window ledge at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The nest sits just outside a window where a camera has been positioned to create this video stream. The camera looks through the glass window pane. No artificial lighting has been added, so the nest is only visible during daylight hours.

The nest was productive in 2009 and it is again now! Two hatchlings hatched already and one is about to! You can watch it live, here:

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

“Here’s an emerging opportunity for citizen-science,” wrote Richard Sclove, a mentor and colleague working with me on this effort.

Sclove attached this NYTimes article illustrating why “doctors, researchers, drug makers and regulators should pay more attention to patients’ firsthand reports of their symptoms while they take medicines, because their information could help to guide treatment and research, and uncover safety problems.”

The following particular quote in the article caught my attention, because it punctuates the importance of seeking direct input from the end-user (patients, in this case; consumers or citizens in situations involving stem cells, geoengineering, synthetic bio, etc.). It is attributed to Dr. Ethan Bash, an oncologist who published this report in the New England Journal of Medicine:

“Direct reports from patients are rarely used during drug approval or in clinical trials,” Dr. Basch says. “If patients’ comments are sought at all, they are usually filtered through doctors and nurses, who write their own impressions of what the patients are feeling.”

This type of second- or third-hand interpretation can be misleading. Take a look at the graph on the left, for example (courtesy of The New York Times). There are a host of possible and plausible explanations listed in the Times piece as to why doctors and nurses don’t do a better job of reporting what patients tell them. They’re not being deviant or trying to harm the patients when they substitute their own interpretations for what’s actually being reported by the patient. Nor are scientists and policy makers when they serve to speak on our behalf. But the sum result = misinformation and that’s not helpful to anyone.

Doctors, kindly listen more carefully to your patients; scientists and policymakers, consider taking citizen input seriously. If you think the U.S.A. does a good job doing so, I invite you to read this brief post on the differences between how we  view public participation here vs. how it’s viewed in the U.K.

Last week, the Charlotte Observer ran this article about the growing popularity of all-things-citizen science. The Science Cheerleader is quoted. [Admires self in reflection of computer monitor.]

Innocentive built the first global Web community for open innovation where organizations or “Seekers” submit complex problems or “Challenges” for resolution to a “Solver” community of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business professionals, and research organizations in more than 200 countries. Prizes for winning solutions are financial awards up to $1,000,000 although most hover around the $10K-$25K range. Not too bad for a couple of day’s worth of creative thinking. Solver David Bradin (a chemist-turned-attorney) explains his flash of insight moment when he scrolled through Innocentive’s list of challenges and came up with a solution almost out of the blue. “It took me more time to register as a Solver than it took to win the Challenge,” he quips.

Last week, Innocentive’s CEO, Dwayne Spradlin announced a partnership with The Economist:

“We are trying to tackle the most complex and dire issues facing humanity- how do you provide access to clean water in developing countries? How do you feed everyone in areas with burgeoning populations? In our partnership with The Economist, these are the types of questions we will be asking. By tapping into the world’s brightest minds for access to fresh and bold thinking we can empower real invention and meaningful growth.”

Spradlin is a real evangelist for crowd-sourcing and collaboration. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with him about participatory technology assessment and citizen science (public involvement in science research and science policy discussions). He described Science Cheerleader and its sister site, ScienceForCitizens.net, as “close cousins” of Innocentive. I agree! These sites demonstrate an authentic belief in the benefits of public participation–from restoring trust, to creating a better informed citizenry, to assessing risks–all while advancing innovation.

Sometimes the best ideas come from the fringes.

Harvard University did a study on Innocentive’s solvers and found that, on average, people who solved the posted challenges were six areas away from the discipline most closely associated with the challenge. For example, a few years ago an oil company posted a speculative challenge for an application likely to be needed in the Artic: the capability to empty tanks in freezing conditions. Not an easy task. When oil gets cold and starts to coagulate, siphoning it is akin to sipping the last bits of a Slurpee (you know how the icy bits move to the side, making it tricky to sip up anything good?).

Who came up with the winning solution? An industry outsider.  How? “It really had nothing to do with my training or education,” he explained in an interview with me last year. “It was the result of a chance encounter with a cement mixer.”

“As it happens, I was earning a summer income as a construction worker a few weeks before I stumbled upon Innocentive’s website. We were mixing and pouring cement. I noticed that the cement was starting to set in the mixer and I alerted my buddy. He walked over to the mixer and touched it with a cement vibrator. The agitation recalibrated the consistency of the cement in a matter of seconds. When I read about the oil removal challenge on Innocentive, I immediately thought of ways to simply attach a cement vibrator to the oil drums.”

His winning solution netted a cool $25,000. Here he is to tell us more:

Yesterday, Innocentive featured Science Cheerleader’s sister site, ScienceForCitizens.net!

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

The Rise of the Citizen Scientist.

We recently discovered a new web site, Science for Citizens, started by Science Cheerleader founder Darlene Cavalier and her business partner Michael Gold.  The site attracts a wide spectrum of people, who may or may not be “official scientists” but who enjoy working on scientific projects in their spare time.

We love the idea of the citizen scientist – many of these people have the same profile as our Solvers.   And we particularly like this site, because it has such a wide variety of interesting projects, from monitoring water quality in the Willamette River to building habitats for Monarch butterflies to helping build a database of dinosaur bones.  In addition, people who are enthusiastic about their projects are welcome to submit blog posts about any scientific topic that interests them.  Using the “Project Finder,” users can search projects based on time commitment involved, whether the project takes place indoors or outdoors, degree of difficulty – there are even projects that are suitable for children.  The site is still in beta, but we think it’s a great idea – in fact, we even posted one of our Challenges there.   We asked one of the founders, Michael Gold, to tell us a bit more about the project: read the full story.

I recently had a chance to see my favorite citizen science-loving indie rock band, DeVille, perform live in Washington DC. I had so much fun that I even put together this video, which includes an inspirational interview with lead guitarist, Ian Graham. Check it out if you can spare three minutes for non-stop fun and rockin’ power-pop music.

For more info, make sure to check out Deville’s website. Gooooooooooo DeVille!

Posts have been less frequent because I’ve been prepping for the ScienceOnline 2010 conference in North Carolina where I’ll be speaking on the topics of Science in the Media (with Dr. Kiki); Adult Science Literacy; and Citizen Science.

Exciting news to add: I’ll be doing a soft launch of SciCheer’s sister site: ScienceForCitizens.net . It’s something my partner, Michael Gold, and I have been working on for a long time. Thanks to the generous support of Science House and help from our own Dr. John Ohab, the site is finally crystalizing! Known as “THE source for people who want to do science,” the site will serve as a Craigslist meets Match.com in the realm of citizen science. Interested in learning about or participating in research projects? We’ve got something for you (no degree? no worries! ). Looking to  find volunteers for your project? Just add it to our (soon-to-be extensive) database of projects.

Sign up to be notified when the site is live (Saturday morning) and consider joining us on Twitter (@sci4cits) and Facebook: Science For Citizens .

2009 was a thrilling year for citizen scientists (you know, those “average citizens” who volunteer to lend their brains to science). It wasn’t that long ago, when as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, I’d inevitably be met with blank stares when I uttered the words “citizen science.” But this year, we witnessed a rising tide and 2010 will surely bring with it tidal waves of citizen science breakthroughs.

A recent report to the National Science Foundation concluded: “The number of published scientific papers based on citizen-collected data is increasing each year. Many more projects could be created that will appeal to the increasing numbers of amateur naturalists and stargazers who are interested in lending their brains to science.” And indeed, hundreds, if not thousands, of new citizen science projects are now underway.

In mid-January, my partner (Michael Gold) and I, with support from  Science House will run a soft launch of ScienceForCitizens.net, the Craigslist meets Match.com in the realm of citizen science. A one-stop shop for learning about and contributing to the massive variety of existing projects out there. Opportunities for collaborations exist, just drop me a line at darlene@sciencecheerleader.com if you’re interested.

First, a nod to the giants whose shoulders we (citizen science advocates) stand upon:

• Cornell University has some of the longest running citizen science projects, primarily in the field of ornithology. Thanks to Rick Bonney and his tireless team, Cornell continues to dominate the field. See Citizen Science Central.
• Terrie Miller launched her blog way before most of us even knew what a “blog” was. She practices what she preaches and has taken the lead in bringing permaculture to the masses.
• Yale, Oxford and NASA’s Galaxy Zoo project amassed hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers to sort through images of the galaxies. Wisely, they’ve partnered with other space science projects through which massive amounts of data are collected, and recently launched the Citizen Science Alliance as a mechanism to share and decipher gold mines of information.
• The Society of Amateur Scientist, 15 years old and counting, has a loyal membership of innovative problem solvers. SAS is led by Dr. Shawn Carlson and uber amateur scientist Forrest Mimms.

2009 wrap up:
Here are but some of the many citizen science news items of 2009:
The NY Academy of Sciences: The Growth of Citizen Science
The New York Times: A New Kind of Big Science
O’Reilly Report: Citizen Science and Urban Sensing
TreeHugger: The Big Deal with Citizen Science
Education.com: Citizen Science benefits to children
Seed Magazine: Creating Citizen Scientists
CNN Citizen Science and Climate Change

Every good idea needs a critic. If additional proof is needed that citizen science is more than just a passing fancy, witness the emergence of the critics. I, for one, value the opinions of critics as important tools to help keep well-intended efforts from becoming (too) manipulated by opportunists. The critics will keep things honest. In fact, you can expect to read some critical articles and posts written by me…shortly! For now, check out  Science is not a democracy and AIG executive pay and the citizen scientist.

2009 Citizen Scientists of Distinction. Our Founding Fathers were the pinnacle representatives of “amateur scientists” or “citizen scientists.” PBS lays out its list of all-time Great Amateurs in Science here.
Today, their spirit lives on in the likes of (previously mentioned) Shawn Carlson and Forrest Mimms,  as well as through these lesser known citizen scientists, who made the headlines in 2009: (Special thanks to @scicheer Twitter followers for weighing in with your favorites.)

• Anthony Wesley,  a computer programmer and amateur astronomer who lives in Australia, discovered a hole in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the size of the Earth! He tipped off NASA. In a remarkable twist of fate, the discovery was made on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the 15th anniversary of another large comet strike on Jupiter.

• Like it or not, at least three citizen scientists played key roles in what has become known as Climategate.

• Six-year-old Alyson Yates and her mom, Kate, discovered a rare nine-spotted ladybug while taking part in Cornell University’s Lost Ladybug citizen science project. This native species had been taken over by the Asian imported seven-spotted bugs, in the 1970s. Researchers at Cornell are breeding the native species and hope to introduce them back to the land that was once their own.

• By running DNA tests, teenagers in NYC found a new breed of cockroach and discovered food labels lie. Their adventures are wrapped in this NPR piece about the bubbling DIY biology movement.

• Shawn Carlson gives Popular Mechanics his short list of top amateur science projects here.

And, interesting factoid for you Batman fans, it turns out Cat Woman was once inspired by an amateur scientist who studied snowflakes (character’s based on the real amateur scientist who studied snowflakes).

Last but not least, here’s a shout out to the world’s greatest citizen science reporters, Dr. John Ohab ,  Sarah Chobot–soon to be a Ph.D.!–John Collier and our skeptical cheerleader, Occam’s Razor, of course. Thank you for enlightening and inspiring thousands of readers.

Happy 2010! Now go get your hands dirty with science!

-Darlene