Science Cheerleader

Proteus Gowanus is calling all citizen scientists in the area to help them map out the distribution of crickets and katydids throughout the five boroughs of New York City on September 11, 2009 (rain date: September 12, 2009) from dusk to 1:00 am.  Crickets and katydids, like many of the other natural creatures I have blogged about in the past, are part of urban ecosystems, but are fading fast as their resources disappear.  Creating a distribution map of their locations through New York City will speak volumes about the types of habitats needed to sustain their survival.

Very little training is required to discern a cricket call versus that of a katydid, but the organizers will be providing a brief online training for participants prior to the crawl, as well as in-person demonstrations at the headquarters before the crawl begins.  Throughout the evening, volunteers would listen for the calls of crickets and katydids and document their observations with pencil and paper. (Or, those citizen scientists that are more technically saavy than I am can ditch their pencil and paper and submit their findings via text messaging for real-time analyses at Cricket Crawl headquarters.)

Signing up for the crawl is easy!  Just e-mail cricket_crawl@yahoo.com for more details.  Also, if you are interested in volunteering beyond just recording the calls of crickets, you can play a larger role in the organization of Cricket Crawl by creating a Cricket Crawl website, Facebook page, or a Twitter network.  And for those citizen scientists with an artistic side, Proteus Gowanus is also looking for artists to create pieces in connection with the crawl that could be posted in an online gallery.  Interested artists should e-mail info@proteusgowanus.com for more details.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: crickets, urban ecosystems
• Location: at home or close to home, if you live in NYC
• Duration: one starry night, from dusk to 1 am
• Cost: free or low cost
• Gear: pencil and paper, and/or a phone with text messaging capability
• Level of Difficulty: easy

Though our continued support for citizen scientist programs across the country is vital to the success of directed scientific research about specific topics, we also need make sure we remain broadly educated about the general scientific issues we face everyday. The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE), located in Philadelphia, is one of the first urban environmental education centers established in the United States, and has been dedicated to teaching the citizens of Philadelphia about issues facing their community for over forty years.  Their adult citizen science lecture series is still ongoing, with two lectures left this season.  The schedule for each of the seminars is the same:

• 6:30 p.m.  Reception & informal information session featuring refreshments and displays from visiting organizations.
• 7:00 p.m.  Program followed by a question and answer session with the speaker

On Thursday, May 21, three of the Philadelphia’s leading landscape architects will be conducting a discussion about how landscape architecture is at the forefront of the sustainability movement.  This program will include a guided tour of “Gimme Shelter: sustainable woodland shelters on a small scale”, at 6 pm.  (My roommate is a landscape architect at the Olin Studio here in Philadelphia, and I find her work to be extremely exciting!  While Olin is not one of the firms represented on this panel, I can personally attest that the works produced by landscape architects are not just works of art — they also preserve the natural environment all cities need to flourish.) On Thursday, June 4, representatives of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, PhillyCarShare, SEPTA, and other regional transportation organizations present realistic alternatives to owning and driving automobiles in and around Philadelphia. I will be present at both of these lectures, and will be writing a follow-up article to fill you non-Philadelphians on what you missed.  If you would like to join me, The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE) is located in the northwest corner of Philadelphia in the neighborhood of Roxborough.  Their address is: 8480 Hagy’s Mill Road, Philadelphia, PA 19128.

I’m heading to Phoenix for a few days to meet with the Science Debate organizers. I won’t be there long enough to catch the big Eagles-Cardinals football show down on Sunday. If mascots have any influence on the outcome, the Cardinals are going down (says the Philly chick and former 76ers cheerleader). Check out these quirky science facts about the two birds:

Cardinal: The male cardinal is the defender of their breeding territory. In fact, it can spend long hours fighting his reflection he sees in glass surfaces.  (Note to Coach Reid: there’s got to be a way to weave this into an offensive plan.)

Eagle:The Bald Eagle, the living symbol of the U.S.A.’s freedoms, spirit and pursuit of excellence, is a strong bird that can live up to 28 years in the wild. Mating: during the Cartwheel Display a pair flies to great heights and then locks feet together as they go do “cartwheels” plummeting down towards the ground. They only break apart at the very last moment. (Here’s hoping the Eagles don’t break apart at the last moment on Sunday.)

All this talk about birds reminds me. Now’s the perfect time to participate in the 10- Minute Urban Bird Watch, a citizen science activity sponsored by Cornell University. “You become a citizen-scientist by observing birds in your neighborhood and sending the data to scientists at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.” And, you’ll learn how to protect birds from urban threats.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

Topics: Ornithology, Gardening

Location: Close to home; Outdoors.

Level of Difficulty: Very easy.

Fee: No fee. Free registration, kit and bonus sunflower seeds!

Gear: Pencil, paper, access to computer.

Duration: A little as 10 minutes, as often as you’d like.

Suitable for students as well. Website offers links to additional ornithology citizen science projects.

Want to gaze at stunning astronomical photographs and help astronomers do their research at the same time? Meet, GalaxyZoo.org, a Web site that enables amateur galaxy analyzers to work from the comfort of their computers.

You don’t need any specialized knowledge. After going through a brief tutorial and qualifying test, you can head to the Galaxy Analysis portion of the site and start reviewing images that need to be cataloged. Just look over each object’s shape and label it with the proper “profile”: spiral galaxy, elliptical galaxy, star, or don’t know.

Volunteers have turned out millions of galaxy classifications, which affiliated scientists will be including in upcoming journal articles. The site reports that last year, its “armchair astronomers” discovered more than “500 overlapping galaxies in the local universe when astronomers had previously only known of 20 such systems.”

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

> Topics: Astronomy, computers.
> Location: At home, office, or anywhere you can get to a computer.
> Duration: As short or as long as you like. It only takes a moment to classify each galaxy.
> Cost: Free.
> Gear: Computer with Internet access.
> Level of difficulty: Easy (after you do the tutorial).