A desert horned lizard was one of several species of lizards found by researchers during a survey of reptiles in Joshua Tree National Park on April 1. Scientists with UC Riverside and the national park have been working with volunteers to survey plants and animals in a project that aims to track the effects of…
Sevengill Shark “Notorynchus cepedianus” by José María Pérez Nuñez CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Diver-citizen scientists help find out why there has been a recent increase in the number of Sevengill Sharks spotted in the San Diego area The first thing the divers noticed upon reaching the bottom was that there were absolutely no…
The Internet, Web 2.0 and Social Networking technologies are enabling citizens to actively participate in “citizen science” projects by contributing data to scientific programs. However, the limited expertise of contributors can lead to poor quality or misleading data being submitted. Subsequently, the scientific community often perceive citizen science data as not worthy of being used in serious…
Hurricane shown on a weather radar (Photo: NOAA) Civic minded citizen scientists in your community help meteorologists and the National Weather Service stay abreast of inclement weather with on-the-ground data. Earlier this week, the Midwest and Northeast were slammed with tornados and thunderstorms that grounded planes and held up trains. Thousands of people along the…
We show how machine learning and inference can be harnessed to leverage the complementary strengths of humans and computational agents to solve crowdsourcing tasks. We construct a set of Bayesian predictive models from data and describe how the models operate within an overall crowdsourcing architecture that combines the eorts of people and machine vision on…
Once a warship, the HMCS Yukon is now an artificial reef providing much needed sanctuary for local marine life. Source Michael Bear. This is a guest post Michael Bear Citizen Science Project Director at Ocean Sanctuaries. In this post, he describes a citizen science led effort to catalog marine life living in and around the HMCS…
Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist said, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The sentiment rings true for citizen science. Yet, recent news in the citizen science world has been headlined “Most participants in citizen science projects give up almost…
Recently, I sat down and had a think about what I had seen in the past, as well as some of trends that I’ve been noticing. Today, I’m going to review some of those and also go out on a limb with some predictions as to where I see citizen science heading. It’s Definitely a…
Record of the first bibliography can be traced back to the Ancient Library of Alexandria. The former Macedonian general Ptolemy I Soter, who was a successor to Alexander the Great, founded the library. The library itself would go on to become a renowned center of scholarship. The website History of Information records that in approximately…