Citizen Scientists Still Finding New Insect Species in SoCal

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By now the story has become something of a local legend. It goes something like this: Brian Brown, entomology curator at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, bet a museum donor that he could find a new species, entirely unknown to science, just about anywhere.

It sounds like an audacious claim until you realize that there are perhaps as many as 8.7 billion species that exist, right now, on planet Earth. Of those, most are animals. Then there are more than a quarter million plant species, and nearly two thirds of a million kinds of fungi. The rest are critters like protozoans and algae. We are members of a staggeringly large biological family tree, exceedingly difficult to comprehend in its vastness.

Think of every animal you know about. All the bumblebees and dragonflies, every type of fox and antelope, lizard and pigeon, bluebird and mountain lion, coyote and koala. Then add all the zebras and giraffes and lions and crocodiles, plus each type of whale and sea lion, all the shrimps and clams, sea stars and lake bass, frogs and jellyfish. There are flowers and trees and ferns and kelp, tiny parasitic plants that live only inside other plants, and even tinier organisms that feed only on those parasitic plants.

After you account for every single species we know about, you’re left with just 1.2 million. According to one estimate, some 86 percent of terrestrial species remain entirely unknown, plus another 91 percent of marine critters. Given all that, it seems as if Brown would actually have to try hard not to discover a new species every time he turned over another rock or fallen tree branch.

Source: Citizen Scientists Still Finding New Insect Species in SoCal

Editor’s Choice: Supporting emerging forms of citizen science: a plea for diversity, creativity and social innovation

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Who doesn’t like a discussion of what exactly citizen science is? This paper is a timely reminder of the wide diversity of ways in which people participate in science, and the need to support all sorts of projects instead of merely repeating ourselves again and again.

Abstract:

In recent years, citizen science has gained popularity not only in the scientific community but also with the general public. The potential it projects in fostering an open and participatory approach to science, decreasing the distance between science and society, and contributing to the wider goal of an inclusive society is being explored by scientists, science communicators, educators, policy makers and related stakeholders. The public’s participation in citizen science projects is still often reduced to data gathering and data manipulation such as classification of data. However, the citizen science landscape is much broader and diverse, inter alia due to the participation opportunities offered by latest ICT. The emergence of new forms of collaboration and grassroots initiatives is currently being experienced. In an open consultation process that led to the “White Paper on Citizen Science for Europe”, the support of a wide range of project types and innovative forms of participation in science was requested. In this paper we argue for mechanisms that encourage a variety of approaches, promote emerging and creative concepts and widen the perspectives for social innovation.

Photo Credit: Figure 3 from article.

Source: Supporting emerging forms of citizen science: a plea for diversity, creativity and social innovation

Emergency management perspectives on volunteered geographic information: Opportunities, challenges and change

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Abstract:

Volunteered geographic information (VGI) refers to the widespread creation and sharing of geographic information by private citizens, often through platforms such as online mapping tools, social media, and smartphone applications. VGI has shifted the ways information is created, shared, used and experienced, with important implications for applications of geospatial data, including emergency management. Detailed interviews with 13 emergency management professionals from eight organisations across five Australian states provided insights into the impacts of VGI on official emergency management. Perceived opportunities presented by VGI included improved communication, acquisition of diverse local information, and increased community engagement in disaster management. Identified challenges included the digital divide, data management, misinformation, and liability concerns. Significantly, VGI disrupts the traditional top-down structure of emergency management and reflects a culture shift away from authoritative control of information. To capitalise on the opportunities of VGI, agencies need to share responsibility and be willing to remain flexible in supporting positive community practises, including VGI. Given the high accountability and inherently responsive nature of decision making in disaster management, it provides a useful lens through which to examine the impacts of VGI on official authoritative systems more broadly. This analysis of the perceptions of emergency management professionals suggests changes to traditional systems that involve decentralisation of power and increased empowerment of citizens, where value is increasingly recognised in both expert and citizen-produced information, initiatives and practises.

Source: Emergency management perspectives on volunteered geographic information: Opportunities, challenges and change

Addressing Common Student Technical Errors in Field Data Collection: An Analysis of a Citizen-Science Monitoring Project

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Abstract:

The scientific value of citizen-science programs is limited when the data gathered are inconsistent, erroneous, or otherwise unusable. Long-term monitoring studies, such as Our Project In Hawai’i’s Intertidal (OPIHI), have clear and consistent procedures and are thus a good model for evaluating the quality of participant data. The purpose of this study was to examine the kinds of errors made by student researchers during OPIHI data collection and factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of these errors. Twenty-four different types of errors were grouped into four broad error categories: missing data, sloppiness, methodological errors, and misidentification errors. “Sloppiness” was the most prevalent error type. Error rates decreased with field trip experience and student age. We suggest strategies to reduce data collection errors applicable to many types of citizen-science projects including emphasizing neat data collection, explicitly addressing and discussing the problems of falsifying data, emphasizing the importance of using standard scientific vocabulary, and giving participants multiple opportunities to practice to build their data collection techniques and skills.

Source: Addressing Common Student Technical Errors in Field Data Collection: An Analysis of a Citizen-Science Monitoring Project

Kinsey Reporter: Citizen Science for Sex Research

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Abstract:

Kinsey Reporter is a global mobile app to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex. Reports are submitted via smartphone, then visualized on a website or downloaded for offline analysis. In this paper we present the major features of the Kinsey Reporter citizen science platform designed to preserve the anonymity of its contributors, and preliminary data analyses that suggest questions for future research.

Source: Kinsey Reporter: Citizen Science for Sex Research

Listening to the Forest and its Curators: Lessons Learnt from a Bioacoustic Smartphone Application Deployment

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Abstract:

Our natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a tension between the technology and their established working practices. From our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing citizen science apps.

Source: Listening to the Forest and its Curators: Lessons Learnt from a Bioacoustic Smartphone Application Deployment

‘Citizen Scientists’ In California Use Drones To Map El Nino Flooding

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Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastline’s changing face.

Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Nino, a weather pattern that’s bringing California its wettest winter in years — and all in the name of science.

The idea is that crowd-sourced, geotagged images of storm surges and flooded beaches will give scientists a brief window into what the future holds as sea levels rise from global warming, a sort of crystal ball for climate change.

Images from the latest drones, which can produce high-resolution 3D maps, will be particularly useful and will help scientists determine if predictive models about coastal flooding are accurate, said Matt Merrifield, the organization’s chief technology officer.

“We use these projected models and they don’t quite look right, but we’re lacking any empirical evidence,” he said. “This is essentially a way of ‘ground truthing’ those models.”

Experts on climate change agreed that El Nino-fueled storms offer a sneak peek of the future and said the project was a novel way to raise public awareness. Because of its crowd-sourced nature, however, they cautioned the experiment might not yield all the results organizers hoped for, although any additional information is useful.

“It’s not the answer, but it’s a part of the answer,” said Lesley Ewing, senior coastal engineer with the California Coastal Commission. “It’s a piece of the puzzle.”

Source: ‘Citizen Scientists’ In California Use Drones To Map El Nino Flooding

Editor’s Choice: Where are the failures?

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One of the reasons we were excited to start Citizen Science Today was the chance to highlight commentary and results from a wide range of sources, but I didn’t expect us to be featuring a post from a mailing list. Nonetheless, Ben Brumfield’s careful response to the question ‘where are the failures?’ on a transcription mailing list provides food for thought for anyone surveying the citizen science landscape.
–Chris

Øyvind makes an excellent point. Opportunities for failure abound,
especially in projects (like crowdsourced transcription) that require
such a large investment into digitization and software development up
front, but which are often justified by eventual cost savings. I
suspect that many failures–especially the ones which fail due to
inability to find motivated volunteers–are costly failures indeed and
are not adequately publicized. Nevertheless, I think I can come up
with some failure stories.

It’s only fair to start with a personal example. In 2012, I started
work with Free UK Genealogy. Because this organization had been
running crowdsourced transcription projects off-line for almost two
decades, our goal was to rewrite the entire technical stack. We began
building new transcription tools to replace the existing system of
spreadsheets and emails. However, the existing volunteers (who were
comfortable with the existing system) rebelled at the idea of
replacing the tools they were familiar with for no obvious benefit to
them. Within a year we had to table the effort and instead focus on
the public-facing website/search engine. This proved very popular,
and now we feel that we have more support for the transcription tool
project. Nevertheless, we’re only revisiting the transcription tool
now, four years after the re-write was started.

Photo Credit: Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham

Source: LISTSERV 16.0 – TEI-L Archives

Can citizen science empower disenfranchised communities?

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Early in 2015, a group calling itself the Nappy Science Gang hit the parenting scene in the U.K. It was made up of moms and dads who used cloth nappies – or diapers – with their kids, and wanted to know the best ways to keep them clean and safe.

The Nappy Science Gang is part of a growing global movement toward citizens getting involved in science. Over the past few years, there’s been an explosion of opportunities for ordinary people to collect data for researchers, and sometimes help analyze it. Platforms such as Zooniverse, Scientific American and SciStarter are all helping citizens (anyone who’s part of a community, in this context) connect with scientists and get involved with the process of scientific discovery.

Without doubt, the movement is enabling more people than ever before to become engaged in science and to contribute toward scientific progress. Yet in many of these citizen science projects, researchers remain firmly in the driver’s seat – asking the questions, setting the agenda and making sense of the data. They’re big on engagement, maybe not so much on empowerment – especially when it comes to issues that directly affect participants’ lives.

Citizens setting the science agenda

This is where the Nappy Science Gang is different. It represents an emerging trend where citizens partner with experts to do the science that’s useful to them and their community, not just someone else.

Partnerships like this can have wide-reaching consequences. One question asked by the Nappy Science Gang, for instance, was: why are biological detergents not advisable for washing cloth diapers?

Despite this being the advice given by organizations like the U.K. National Health Service, the group’s research findings didn’t seem to support it. So they asked one of their expert advisers for help.

Unable to explain things, the expert in turn approached the NHS – which also failed to find the scientific basis for their original recommendation.

And as a result, the agency changed its position on the use of biological detergents.

The Nappy Science Gang is a good example of how citizen-led science can empower individuals and communities to make informed decisions and influence policy decisions.

Another example is currently playing out in North America. But in this case, the stakes – and the consequences – are far, far higher.

Source: Can citizen science empower disenfranchised communities?

The Impact of Coordinated Social Media Campaigns on Online Citizen Science Engagement

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Smithsonian staff members recently presented a poster at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, 11-15 February, 2016. The poster, entitled “The Impact of Coordinated Social Media Campaigns on Online Citizen Science Engagement” by Lesley Parilla (Cataloging Coordinator, The Field Book Project) and Meghan Ferriter, Ph.D. (Project Coordinator, Smithsonian Transcription Center), highlighted the impact of a coordinated social media campaign on crowdsourced transcriptions of field notes.

The poster outlined the details and outcomes of the #FWTrueLove campaign, a collaboration involving The Field Book Project, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, Pyenson Lab, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The event challenged volunteers to fully transcribe a selection of field notes by Frederick W. True, held by the Smithsonian Institution Archives and uploaded to the Smithsonian Transcription Center, by the end of the campaign period. Materials for the challenge were identified and selected with Smithsonian Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals Dr. Nick Pyenson and the Smithsonian Field Book Project, a joint initiative of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Institution Archives. The field notes are an important source of natural science data that is difficult to utilize, since they are often handwritten and fragile due to age.

Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Impact of Coordinated Social Media Campaigns on Online Citizen Science Engagement