I <3 Citizen Science (and you can too)!

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Citizen science is hardly a new concept; yet, it’s still new to many. The Maker revolution has hit certain demographics and certain demographics would call themselves citizen scientists. But more can participate.

There are those volunteers that help collect data for more major organizations (bird watching is a huge spot for this but also other species observation and data collection; there are a ton of others from monitoring water to trees to sky). There are big name ones like The Planetary Society run by Bill Nye (the Science Guy) who does space travel advocacy, but also tries its own, non-government, non-university, privately funded and managed projects. There are also science clubs, and not just one run by a teacher in a middle school.

Hackers and their groups don’t have to be about computer programs. It’s about making something out of something else, it’s about exploring and having fun trying things, it’s real-life discussions and collaborations. And you don’t have to be a billionaire to go for it. Along with the Maker Revolution, I’d like to think there is a Science Revolution afoot too, or at least something like it; where everyday people are curious and want to design their own studies and they don’t necessarily want to be in a formal or university setting to do it. Yes, collaborating with experienced scientists is optimal, but not necessary, and an experienced scientist doesn’t necessarily have to have a PhD. That can come later (or not).

Granted, at the moment, universities, government agencies, and corporations tend to have the best toys, but that doesn’t mean the the regular person with drive and interest can’t make it (or some, less sophisticated version) happen for themselves. Please, by all means, consider safety! Of yourself and others. But a lot of the tools breakthrough scientists have used, they made themselves. You can too.

There are many types and styles of learning and traditional academia often doesn’t do the trick or offer the freedom to explore (I still feel a little sick to my stomach every time I think about high school). Many people can’t sit still or learn better interacting with others or by doing things or taking a lot of breaks and reading in their own time at their own pace. The point is that there are intelligent people who don’t fit the mold but still have something to contribute. Creativity, ideas, and willpower.

Source: I <3 Citizen Science (and you can too)!

Editor’s Choice: The Theory and Practice of Citizen Science: Launching a New Journal

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We are pleased to welcome into the world the new journal “Citizen Science: Theory and Practice” – one hope for this Citizen Science Today aggregator site is to bring forward grey literature from e.g. blog posts and promote it as an important part of the emerging conversation on citizen science that CSTP will only enhance. — LFF —

The field of citizen science is growing with breathtaking speed. Thousands of citizen science projects are now under way around the world, engaging millions of individuals in the process of scientific discovery. In the US, citizen science has been featured at the White House and the federal government has launched a website to showcase federally funded citizen science projects (citizenscience.gov). The largest research and innovation funding program in the European Union, Horizon 2020, is investing heavily in citizen science to tackle societal problems. The Australian government has published a vision for citizen science throughout the country (Pecl et al. 2015). Three professional associations supporting citizen science recently have been launched: The Citizen Science Association (CSA; citizenscience.org), the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA; ecsa.citizen-science.net), and the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA; citizenscience.org.au/). Some researchers consider citizen science to have emerged as a distinct field of inquiry (e.g., Jordan et al. 2015). Dozens of articles focused on citizen science are appearing every month, some in prestigious journals such as Science, Nature, and Bioscience, and a number of journals across a huge range of disciplines recently have or soon will publish special issues on citizen science, including Ecology and Society, Journal of Science Communication, Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, Conservation Biology, and Biological Conservation.

In this exploding citizen science landscape, what is the role of Citizen Science: Theory and Practice (CSTP)?

CSTP is an online, open access, interdisciplinary and international journal sponsored by the CSA in cooperation with ECSA and ACSA. As a global venue for scholarly exchange about citizen science, the journal’s focus is to explore and better understand citizen science in all its facets — for example, lessons from successes and failures in the development and implementation of citizen science tools and projects; techniques for the communication and visualization of project results and measurement of outcomes; and critical examination of the many ways that citizen science can yield a range of scientific, educational, and social outcomes.

Photo Credit: Photo by Karlie Roland, NPS, via North Cascades National Park on Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Photo appears in article.

Source: The Theory and Practice of Citizen Science: Launching a New Journal

Design Guidelines for the User-Centred Collaborative Citizen Science Platforms

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Abstract:

Online Citizen Science platforms are good examples of socio-technical systems where technology-enabled interactions occur between scientists and the general public (volunteers). Citizen Science platforms usually host multiple Citizen Science projects, and allow volunteers to choose the ones to participate in. Recent work in the area has demonstrated a positive feedback loop between participation and learning and creativity in Citizen Science projects, which is one of the motivating factors both for scientists and the volunteers. This emphasises the importance of creating successful Citizen Science platforms, which support this feedback process, and enable enhanced learning and creativity to occur through knowledge sharing and diverse participation. In this paper, we discuss how scientists’ and volunteers’ motivation and participation influence the design of Citizen Science platforms. We present our summary as guidelines for designing these platforms as user-inspired socio-technical systems. We also present the case-studies on popular Citizen Science platforms, including our own CitizenGrid platform, developed as part of the CCL EU project, as well as Zooniverse, World Community Grid, CrowdCrafting and EpiCollect+ to see how closely these platforms follow our proposed guidelines and how these may be further improved to incorporate the creativity enabled by the collective knowledge sharing.

Source: Design Guidelines for the User-Centred Collaborative Citizen Science Platforms

Can An Online Game Help Create A Better Test For TB?

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Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test.

An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially make diagnosing TB as easy as taking a home pregnancy test. The TB puzzle marks the launch of “EteRNA Medicine.”

The idea of rallying gamers to fight TB arose as two young Stanford University professors chatted over dinner at a conference last May. Rhiju Das, a biochemist who helped create EteRNA, told bioinformatician Purvesh Khatri about the game, which challenges nonexperts to design RNA molecules that fold into target shapes.

RNA molecules play key roles in biology and disease. Some brain disorders can be traced to problems with RNA folding. Viruses such as H1N1 flu and HIV depend on RNA elements to replicate and infect cells.

Das wants to “fight fire with fire” — that is, to disrupt the RNA involved in a disease or virus by crafting new tools that are themselves made of RNA molecules. EteRNA players learn RNA design principles with each puzzle they solve.

Source: Can An Online Game Help Create A Better Test For TB?

Gaining a better understanding of the seas through citizen science

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Twice a day, every day, Kera Mathes hops aboard a ship that sets off from Long Beach Harbor in California. As education specialist at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, she helps visitors aboard the ship identify the animals they see. Mathes also supervises the aquarium’s interns (college students and recent graduates), as they collect data and photograph the same creatures. Their information on blue and fin whales goes to the Cascadia Research Collective, an oceanic education and research organization. But for years the interns’ data—weather, time, position, and photos of every sea creature they observe—went unused. Mathes needed a way to share and use such valuable information.

So several years ago she decided to reach out to see if any other research organizations would be interested in the data and images of the other cetaceans. Mathes was in luck: Several researchers—including those at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—were interested in materials on cetaceans other than blue and fin whales. But there was a catch: first Mathes needed to organize the data and identify the cetaceans in the photographs.

That’s when Mathes says she turned to the public for help. Today, so-called “citizen scientists” can help identify the cetaceans in the images she and her interns collect on their ocean cruises so that scientists can translate the images into data for use in ocean conservation. Any member of the public (no science degree or training needed) who commits to helping Mathes four hours a week for at least three months can be a part of her program.

Source: Gaining a better understanding of the seas through citizen science

Editor’s Choice: JCOM Special Issue: Citizen Science, Part I, 2016

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We could have filled this month’s edition of Citizen Science Today with articles from this special edition of JCOM. Instead, follow the link below to read widely and deeply about the field. – CJL –

JCOM is an open access journal on science communication. Since the world of communication and the scientific community are now undergoing a rapid and uncertain transition, JCOM wants to provide some theoretical guidelines both for scholars and practitioners in the field of public communication of science and technology.

Photo credit: Figure 1 from “Cell Spotting: educational and motivational outcomes of cell biology citizen science project in the classroom”.

Source: JCOM Special Issue: Citizen Science, Part I, 2016

Citizen science and freshwater management by Ontario Conservation Authorities

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Abstract:

The contribution of non-experts to environmental management has been significant and continues to flourish through their participation in citizen science. Despite its growth as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, there are many gaps in our understanding of the role that citizen science may play in the future of environmental management. In Ontario, Canada, due to funding cuts and infrastructural changes over the past two decades, the provincial government’s ability to monitor changes in freshwater resources had been severely limited. This has resulted in downloading water monitoring to municipalities through their conservation authorities (CAs) which are watershed-based, quasi-governmental water management agencies. The public has been supplementing monitoring efforts through the thousands of hours they have devoted to water quality citizen science, including volunteer benthic monitoring (VBM). Through their watershed-based structure, their mandate to involve community in their work, their activities managing freshwater and their collaborations with various stakeholders, CAs seem like the ideal organizations to connect the public with the decision makers within the municipalities that manage local freshwater resources. However, their use of citizen science, particularly in benthic monitoring, is rare with most of their data being collected in-house by paid expert staff. By conducting 44 interviews among individuals of CAs and citizen science groups, participating in monitoring and collecting documents published by both these groups as well as administering a survey among all of the 36 CAs, I examined the influence of both CA capacity and attitudes in limiting the use of volunteer benthic monitoring by CAs in their freshwater management decisions. Twenty-nine CAs participated in the survey to some extent, although for 24 of these CAs, only one or two questionnaires were submitted (a total of 67 questionnaires completed). While the CA’s capacity through their organizational dynamics (human resources, flexibility, collaborations) generally supports the use of VBM, they lack the financial and human resources to fully support this form of citizen science. This, along with the attitude that volunteers are not capable of collecting credible monitoring information, makes the widespread adoption of VBM by CAs unlikely. Despite these findings, there is still the potential for CAs to successfully adopt certain types of water quality citizen science that are not as financial and human resource intense as VBM, and that have a broader appeal to variety of types of volunteers.

Source: Citizen science and freshwater management by Ontario Conservation Authorities

Science learning via participation in online citizen science

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Abstract:

We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (http://www.zooniverse.org). We use econometric methods to test how measures of project participation relate to success in a science quiz, controlling for factors known to correlate with scientific knowledge. Citizen scientists believe they are learning about both the content and processes of science through their participation. We don’t directly test the latter, but we find evidence to support the former — that more actively engaged participants perform better in a project-specific science knowledge quiz, even after controlling for their general science knowledge. We interpret this as evidence of learning of science content inspired by participation in online citizen science.

Source: Science learning via participation in online citizen science | JCOM

Researchers find that Earth may be home to 1 trillion species

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Earth could contain nearly 1 trillion species, with only one-thousandth of 1 percent now identified, according to the results of a new study.

The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appears today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The report’s authors are Jay Lennon and Kenneth Locey of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

The scientists combined microbial, plant and animal datasets from government, academic and citizen science sources, resulting in the largest compilation of its kind.

Altogether, these data represent more than 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world’s oceans and continents, except Antarctica.

Great challenge in biology

“Estimating the number of species on Earth is among the great challenges in biology,” Lennon said. “Our study combines the largest available datasets with ecological models and new ecological rules for how biodiversity relates to abundance. This gave us a new and rigorous estimate for the number of microbial species on Earth.”

He added that “until recently, we’ve lacked the tools to truly estimate the number of microbial species in the natural environment. The advent of new genetic sequencing technology provides a large pool of new information.”

The work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dimensions of Biodiversity program, an effort to transform our understanding of the scope of life on Earth by filling major gaps in knowledge of the planet’s biodiversity.

“This research offers a view of the extensive diversity of microbes on Earth,” said Simon Malcomber, director of the Dimensions of Biodiversity program. “It also highlights how much of that diversity still remains to be discovered and described.”

Source: Researchers find that Earth may be home to 1 trillion species

Large-Scale Analysis of Auditory Segregation Behavior Crowdsourced via a Smartphone App

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Abstract:

The human auditory system is adept at detecting sound sources of interest from a complex mixture of several other simultaneous sounds. The ability to selectively attend to the speech of one speaker whilst ignoring other speakers and background noise is of vital biological significance—the capacity to make sense of complex ‘auditory scenes’ is significantly impaired in aging populations as well as those with hearing loss. We investigated this problem by designing a synthetic signal, termed the ‘stochastic figure-ground’ stimulus that captures essential aspects of complex sounds in the natural environment. Previously, we showed that under controlled laboratory conditions, young listeners sampled from the university subject pool (n = 10) performed very well in detecting targets embedded in the stochastic figure-ground signal. Here, we presented a modified version of this cocktail party paradigm as a ‘game’ featured in a smartphone app (The Great Brain Experiment) and obtained data from a large population with diverse demographical patterns (n = 5148). Despite differences in paradigms and experimental settings, the observed target-detection performance by users of the app was robust and consistent with our previous results from the psychophysical study. Our results highlight the potential use of smartphone apps in capturing robust large-scale auditory behavioral data from normal healthy volunteers, which can also be extended to study auditory deficits in clinical populations with hearing impairments and central auditory disorders.

Source: Large-Scale Analysis of Auditory Segregation Behavior Crowdsourced via a Smartphone App