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Let's open this thread as an opportunity for us to discuss Citizen Science,
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Hi Patricia,
I made a collection in the Learning Center that contains articles about various Citzen Science Projects. You can access it here:
https://learningcenter.nsta.org/mylibrary/collection.aspx?id=pW/4873ybvI_E
Best,
Carolyn
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There is an excellent webinar offered on Tuesday evening focusing on the migration of the Monarch Butterfly and the role that students may play as a citizen scientist in the national Monarch programs. Here is info on the webinar. Please join, if you wish.
Monarch Butterflies and Citizen Science, November 27, 2012
Monarch Butterflies and Citizen Science
Michelle-Solensky
Have you ever wondered how the monarchs’ overwintering sites in Mexico were discovered? Learn about this and more in this web seminar about monarchs and citizen science. Register today!
Hope to meet you there.
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I have the privilege of being a volunteer naturalist for the Monarch Monitoring Program of Cape May. We have been tagging and studying the migration of Monarch butterflies along the East Coast and into Mexico for 21 years.
Here is the url for the blog posted by the Monarch Intern for this past season:
http://capemaymonarchs.blogspot.com/
I also had fun recording the passage of this Monarch through the crysalis stage which I put into a short PowerPoint. I will attach the PowerPoint to this email.
I also created a collection of resources that teachers shared during the past two years on Migration and Pattern Recognition.
Chime in and share your experiences netting and tagging Monarchs if you are affiliated with any of the major citizen science programs such as Journey North or Monarch Watch.
Also chime in if you and/or your students participate in the Cornell Backyard Bird count.
Actually, please lend your voice in any and all respects:} We look forward to networking a bit on this thread.
Cheers....patty
Migration and Pattern Recognition Collection
(11 items)
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One of my favorite citizen science projects is fold-it. Foldit is a computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. By playing this game you are helping scientists learn about how proteins fold. It is not necessary to understand the energetics albeit that is what determines the folding.
http://fold.it/portal/info/science
Here is a relevant article
"Research." Citizen Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2012. .
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I have used these in my classes for pre-certification teaches.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citsci/projects
They are great fun and a great learning experience
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This got me interested in looking for other projects. Here are some that I found.
The National Weather Service (NWS) Cooperative Observer Program (COOP) is truly the Nation's weather and climate observing network of, by and for the people. More than 11,000 volunteers take observations on farms, in urban and suburban areas, National Parks, seashores, and mountaintops. The data are truly representative of where people live, work and play. This project has been ongoing since 1890!
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/what-is-coop.html
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Frogwatch USA, developed by the National Wildlife Federation and now a program of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, is an attempt to use citizen scientists to monitor the health of frogs. As the Year of the Frog in 2008 should have taught us, the health of frogs and other amphibians worldwide is not good, as pollution, habitat loss, an aggressive fungal disease and other stresses affect these charismatic species.
You can help by spending as little 20 minutes twice a week observing the frogs breeding in wetlands near your home. In northern parts of the country, frogs breed primarily in the spring, though some species breed throughout the warm months and some breed year-round in warmer latitudes.
http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch/
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The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project (MLMP) is a citizen science project involving volunteers from across the United States and Canada in monarch research. It was developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota to collect long-term data on larval monarch populations and milkweed habitat. The overarching goal of the project is to better understand how and why monarch populations vary in time and space, with a focus on monarch distribution and abundance during the breeding season in North America.
As an MLMP volunteer, your contributions will aid in conserving monarchs and their threatened migratory phenomenon, and advance our understanding of butterfly ecology in general.
http://www.mlmp.org/
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Great Lakes Earthworm Watch
Earthworms? But aren't they good for soil?
Earthworms are actually not native to North American hardwood forests, and by changing the soil they harm the ecosystem that supports the existing forest.
http://www.nrri.umn.edu/worms/team/ongoing.html
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Mountain Watch
The Appalachian Mountain Club's Mountain Watch program seeks to enlist the nation's hikers in an effort to understand changes occurring — due to climate change and air pollution, especially — on America's mountains.
Citizen science opportunities include observations of mountain plants and flowers whose distribution may be shifting as the climate warms, and of visibility, which is affected by smog.
http://www.outdoors.org/conservation/mountainwatch/
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Bee Hunt
We hope you will find Bee Hunt a great way to teach and learn about pollination ecology and other aspects of natural history. Bee Hunt is a participatory science project. It's your research. You are the scientists. By following our methods, you will collect and contribute high-quality data. Collectively your findings will help us all better understand and manage pollinators that are important in growing food and maintaining healthy natural ecosystems.
Bee Hunt is open to anyone, anywhere, whenever pollinators are flying. In North America, depending upon your location, you can start as early as March and go as late as November. It is a part of Discover Life's
http://www.discoverlife.org/bee/
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FireFly Watch
The Museum has teamed up with researchers from Tufts University and Fitchburg State College to track the fate of these amazing insects. With your help, we hope to learn about the geographic distribution of fireflies and their activity during the summer season. Fireflies also may be affected by human-made light and pesticides in lawns, so we hope to also learn more about those effects.
https://www.mos.org/fireflywatch/about_firefly_watch
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The Great SunFlower Project
People all over the country are collecting data on bee pollination in their yards, gardens, schools and parks. We take 15-minute counts of the number and types of bee visits to sunflowers (and other plants). We have been gathering information on pollinator service
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Earlier in this thread I made reference to Fold-it and online game where player contribute information to a citizen science project on protein folding. This game was recently the subject of an article in JChemED
One need not understand the thermodynamics of protein folding to use this game. There are lots of great tutorials
Foldit is a multiplayer online game that utilizes fundamental bonding concepts
instead of computing power to resolve protein structures that have eluded researchers.
Reported herein is the use of Foldit as a problem-based learning assignment for the
understanding of protein folding, interactions, and structure. The program offers tutorial
puzzles to introduce the student to both biochemistry and gaming concepts followed by
scientific puzzles that allow the students to contribute to significant research. This assignment is ideal for biochemistry as well as general, organic, and biochemistry (GOB) courses
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Pamela,
Thank you for all of the great resources. The fold it game is certainly a different approach to citizen science. What type of discourse occurs between the students and the scientists? Or how do the students receive feedback on how their contribution is used?
patty
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http://scistarter.com/ is an amazing resource - they compile citizen science projects by area, topics, state - whether it can be done at home, at school, etc.
When teaching about genetics, I often use the example of dad and physician Hugh Rienhoff who aimed to sequence part of his daughter's genome in the attic with a PCR machine he got on ebay.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-02/ff_diygenetics?currentPage=all
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Hi Dana,
Thank you for the interesting resource. Glancing at it, I selected archeology and found a neat citizen Science project ZooTeach and in does not include zoos specifically but lists a variety of interesting projects from solar storms to whales or a flu survey. There is a broad range of potential projects.
Thank you for sharing and for your specific comments on genetics.
~patty
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Thank you for the interesting resources!
I live by the coast and citizen science oyster spat monitoring is an easy, effective science tool for students. Even if you aren't by Wilmington, NC, I think there are programs all along the east coast (example Chesapeake Bay has a monitoring program) as many areas are trying to restock oyster populations.
http://www.ncoystermonitoring.org/
I haven't done this, but I caught it on CBS evening news last night (12/11/12): Students create their own mini experiments to send up to space in a ping pong ball through a company that launches the experiments. They call the mini experiments "pongsats"
www.jpaerospace.com/pongsat/index.htm
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Jennifer, I love the ping pong ball possibility and will have to investigate it.
And as you mentioned, many of the schools in the Chesapeake watershed and near Norfolk are working with the oyster cultures.
Thanks for sharing.
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Dana,
Thank you for the link to http://scistarter.com/ What an interesting site. I like the one about what makes babies laugh. I have a nineteen month old grandson I love to hear laugh.
I am going to share this link with several people.
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Here are more ideas
EteRNA is a collaborative online game in which volunteers help biologists solve a challenging mystery: what are the rules governing RNA folding? Players who assemble the best RNA designs online will see their creations synthesized in a biochemistry lab.
http://scistarter.com/project/403-EteRNA%20Game:%20Solve%20Puzzles%20for%20Science?tab=project
Project Squirrel calls on volunteers to count the number of squirrels in their neighborhoods and report their findings. The goal is to understand urban squirrel biology, including everything from squirrels to migratory birds, nocturnal mammals, and secretive reptiles and amphibians.
http://scistarter.com/project/38-Project%20Squirrel
The Royal Society put together a playlist of different laughs and asked people to determine if those laughs were real and fake. The results, which will be posted on the project blog soon, will help researchers at the University College of London learn how people react to different sounds. THIS science will make you LOL!
http://scistarter.com/project/666-The%20Royal%20Society%27s%20Laughter%20Project
The Mastodon Matrix Project is a chance to make science history! Volunteers analyze actual samples of matrix (the dirt) from a 14,000 year old mastodon excavated in New York. Shells, bones, hair and other discoveries are then sent back to the Paleontological Research Institution to be further analyzed by paleontologists.
http://scistarter.com/project/250-Mastodon%20Matrix%20Project
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Zooniverse is a site that has thousands of projects as well. I have a student who is participating in NASA's Planet Hunter project and another student who is working on Snapshot Serengeti to help scientists id animals. There is a huge variety of projects, including some humanities projects such as Ancient Lives.
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The zooniverse is an excellent site with many projects. One that just started is Asteroid Zoo.
www.asteroidzoo.org
You have the opportunity to discover asteroids by comparing sets of images of the same section of sky, looking for something that "moves".
My campers have enjoyed looking. The three we found were already known asteroids though, nothing new.
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CoCoRaHS is an acronym for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. CoCoRaHS is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure and map precipitation (rain, hail and snow). By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive Web-site, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications. We are now in all fifty states.
http://www.cocorahs.org/Content.aspx?page=aboutus
There is also a facebook page
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The NEON Citizen Science Academy offers courses for K-12 Formal and Informal educators wanting to incorporate citizen science into their educational programs.
"Intro to Project BudBurst for Educators" provides an overview to support implementation of Project BudBurst in a variety of educational venues.
"How to use Project BudBurst Data in the Classroom" is the follow-up course in which educators learn how to use the new National Geographic Field Scope tools to visualize and analyze Project BudBurst data through a user-friendly, web-based interface.
For those interested in teacher re-certification, all of our courses can be taken for 2 optional, graduate level continuing education credits from Colorado School of Mines.
Registration is Open NOW for the two Winter/Spring Sessions. Each session is limited to 50 participants.
January 29 – February 27
* Introduction to Project BudBurst for Educators
* How to use Project BudBurst Data in the Classroom (Learn about the new National Geographic FieldScope data visualization tools!)
March 26 – April 24
* Introduction to Project BudBurst for Educators
* How to use Project BudBurst Data in the Classroom
Questions? Email: [email protected]
Register at www.citizenscienceacademy.org
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The Conserve B project provides secondary schools with an opportunity to involve their Years 7 to 11 in a scientific experiment on bumblebees, collecting vital information on which flowers the different species forage at and identifying what species of bumblebee they are.
By providing educational materials and getting the students involved in collecting this data, the project aims to increase awareness of the important role of bumblebees in the production of our food and highlight why their numbers are declining, whilst also demonstrating how scientific research can contribute to the conservation of bumblebees. It’s also a fun way to teach students about real scientific experiments in wildlife conservation.
http://www.conserveme.org/foundation/conserveb
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Today is Great Backyard Bird Day. Count and record birds that you see in your yard and neighborhood for a national snapshot of who is where and how many are there.
Here is the information from Project FeedWatch
C:\Users\Patty\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\40OLC4MO\email.mht
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Registration is open for CIESE's "Square of Life," an internet-based
collaborative project in which students
will investigate their local environment and share that information
with other students from around the country and the world.
In this project students will plot square meters in their school yards
and record the living and non-living things that are found therein. They
will submit this information to the project database for all to view.
Students will then compare and contrast their information with that
submitted by other classes and prepare a brief report or presentation
that will be posted to the project web site. Throughout the run of the
project, classes will be encouraged to communicate with other schools
via the Discussion Area.
Please go to the project website for more information, including
project requirements and deadlines. Online registration will be open
until April 1, 2013.
http://ciese.org/curriculum/squareproj/
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An awesome opportunity for your classrooms and/or your professional development on topics of polar bears & climate change.
Check out the Polar Bears International - Tundra Connections® live webcast program.
These are free, live webcasts with polar bear scientists and researchers.
Our spring connections will take place on April 9th.
TOPICS:
Polar Bear Tracker Meet biologists & researchers who track polar bears in the wild. Learn what they know about polar bear populations, tracking bears and how we can all take action to help this species.
Time: 10:00 a.m. Central
Target Audience: Grades 4-8
Livin' Large Like a Polar Bear How big are polar bears and how do they get that way? Explore their unique adaptations to survive the arctic cold.
Time: 11:30 a.m. Central
Target Audience: Grades K-4
Feast to Famine Explore polar bear energetics throughout the year, from gaining mass and energy stores in the spring to avoiding the ill health effects of fasting.
Time: 2:00 p.m. Central
Target Audience: Adult & Professional
For more information about the Tundra Connections program: http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/our-work/educational-programs/tundra-connections
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Pamela,
Thank you for these awesome resources. I will have to share them with some teachers in Sweden who integrate quite a few of their science objectives and studies with the study of the polar bears of Svalbard and the Polar Bear Institute.
Patty
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Nice coverage in Scientific American
Project MERCCURI kicks off at the National Science Teachers Association conference in San Antonio, Texas, on April 11 where project leaders will distribute free kits and teach teachers how to collect samples. Participants will use a sample kit with a q-tip to swab surface areas. Samples will then be analyzed at U.C. Davis, for identification through DNA sequencing.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/project.cfm?id=project-merccuri
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Pam,
the Square of Life activity looks like fun; thanks!
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Join thousands of students around the world to investigate the level of vitamin C in fruit and vegetables. Then plot your results data on our interactive map to compare with students from across the globe! Vitamin C Experiment
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SciStarter now has apps for citizen science projects
http://scistarter.com/?utm_source=Pocket-sized+citizen+science...apps!&utm_campaign=Pocket-sized+Citizen+Science...apps!&utm_medium=email
SciSpy
With this App from The Science Channel, you can spy on nature and contribute to science. Share photos and observations, contribute to research initiatives.
Get started!
SatCam
Capture and share observations of sky and ground conditions near you to help researchers check the quality of satellite data. You'll receive the satellite image captured at your location! Get started!
What's Invasive?
"Invasive" plants crowd out food sources for wild animals and create other headaches in nature. Use this app to help identify and locate them for removal.
Get started!
WildObs
Capture wildlife encounters and use them to develop your own wildlife calendar. Partner of National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Watch working with scientific studies to extract citizen science from your recorded encounters.
Get started!
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I don't think that this one was in the list anywhere....
I first heard of Picture Post in a monthly NOAA Climate Stewards webinar.
http://picturepost.unh.edu/
I plan on starting one in the fall at my school.
I would also like to get an all-sky camera to run in conjunction with our THEMIS magnetometer to allow my students to see if disturbances they see on our data plots match with any auroral displays. I may wait on this until we get closer to the next solar max.
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Chris,
Your posting is very intriguing and leads me to ask where you live and teach. What type of Auroral displays occur in your learning environment?
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I am particularly interested in hearing how anyone has started with a citizen science project in their classrooms as a long-term data collection project and then had students investigate their own ideas after that experience. Using citizen science to spur a project-based science approach. Is anyone doing this?
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Hi Joey,
What are your interests? Are you wanting to build a partnership with another school or another entity? There are so many possibilities with citizen science.
My biology classes work with a LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) site near my school. We study an area on the campus and then we compare it with the LTER site. We have been doing this project for five years in the hopes to continue it until I retire (in twenty years). You might look into an LTER site near your school by going here. Depending on the state and site, there are a variety of ways to get involved.
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Follow the progress of the new initiative NEON. This will be a high tech network of environmental monitors, but also links to at least half a dozen Citizen Science initiatives including BudBurst (one that teachers know and love.)
Citizen Science empowers people and helps them understand that science isn't something elite and remote. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists is an amazing experience.
Google NEON and let people know how important it is.
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Hi everyone! I had the ability to create my very own citizen science project through my science class at school. I am a senior at the University of Northern Iowa and I did a project over a Backyard Bioblitz. I basically went through an adventure in my own backyard. Although I was the one that completed the project and not any students, I think this would be an excellent way for students to feel as if they are doing something meaningful. The kids that I work with would have loved this idea, especially with the warm weather we have been having. I personally think that a Citizen Science Project is an excellent way to get students involved in the ever-growing world of science and being a global citizen too. I have loved reading all of your ideas.
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Hi Hollie! We did a bioblitz at a park where I volunteer, and the participants enjoyed being part of a bigger picture, as you noted. Check out the SciStarter site. It's a clearinghouse for many kinds of citizen science projects, searchable by topic, duration, etc. There are descriptions of each one, including whether it's a once and done project or an ongoing one. For example, I'm doing one personally now that involves looking at cam photos and identifying animals that appeared. I do it to relax, and once in a while I get an email from the project director about an obaservation or a question I had. I could see students getting involved in similar projects at home or in class during 'down time.' -- Mary B
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