Citizen Science 101 Script: Episode 1 Podcast Transcript Hello everyone. This is Margaret Thayer.

Welcome to the Citizen Science 101 podcast! This first episode will explain what Citizen Science is all about, why you might want to become a Citizen Scientist, and how you can get involved in a Citizen Scientist project. Let s start with an easy quiz question: Which of the following activities would you rather spend your time doing? Would it be A. B. C. D. Checking out your friends Facebook pages, Playing a round of golf, Battling trolls in World of Warcraft, or Exploring a graveyard with a GPS device.

If you answered D, you might be a candidate to become a Citizen Scientist! Citizen Scientists are volunteers who collect data for scientists. This partnership benefits both the volunteers and the scientists: Volunteers participate in Citizen Science projects for personal enjoyment and learning, or to gain a sense of community and purpose; the scientists acquire research data that might be difficult or even impossible to gather on their own. The graveyard GPS activity in our quiz question is a real Citizen Science project called the Gravestone Project. Participants in the Gravestone Project use GPS devices to collect graveyard location data. Scientists are using the data collected by volunteers to measure how fast acid rain is affecting marble gravestones in different locations around the world. The Gravestone Project is sponsored by Earth Trek, a citizen scientist program developed by the Geological Society of America. Of course, people without a formal science education have been making observations about the natural world throughout human history. But the term Citizen Science came into use in the 1990s, when the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University founded a Citizen Science Program to involve citizens in the Lab s research projects. Soon after, the term Citizen Science started to pop up elsewhere. By 2001, even the National Science Foundation had incorporated the term into its Informal Science Education program.

Data collection for a Citizen Science project can take place during a scheduled event or continue indefinitely. The data can take many different forms, from photographs of a particular species, to a census count of a population, to responses on a social science survey. One of the most well-known Citizen Science projects is the Audubon Society s Christmas Bird Count. Audubon hosted its first Christmas Bird Count in 1900. On Christmas morning that year, 27 birders in 25 different locations from Canada to California left their cozy holiday gatherings to go outside and count birds. The participants in this oneday census logged 90 different bird species. Audubon s annual Christmas Bird Count has continued to this day, with more than 60,000 volunteers participating around the world every year. The project has led conservationists to detect population declines or shifts in many bird species. The Audubon Christmas Bird Count, the Gravestone Project, and countless other projects like them allow volunteers with little or no special scientific knowledge to contribute to projects that could ultimately have a positive impact on humans or the environment. Today s technology and communication tools have made it much easier for scientists to find volunteers for their projects and much easier for volunteers to collect and share data with scientists. Consequently, a Citizen Science movement has developed. Some see this movement as contributing to a democratization of scientific research by allowing large numbers of people to participate in government-funded research; others point to the movement s potential for improving scientific literacy in an increasingly competitive global economy. The Citizen Science movement has even evolved into an academic pursuit. In January 2011, Bard College in New York initiated a Citizen Science academic program. All Bard undergraduates, whether science, psychology, or art majors, will be required to attend the three-week program during the January inter-session of their freshman year. Bard students attend a laboratory component, a computer-modeling component, and a Problem-Based Learning component but they receive no credits and no grades for their participation. The college hopes the program will not only promote scientific literacy, but also encourage learning for learning s sake. In a New York Times article about the program, a dance major at Bard said she has become more

critical of the science articles she reads as a result of her participation in the Citizen Science program. Other colleges are now offering students the chance to concentrate their studies or even major in the field of Citizen Science. But there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in a Citizen Science project on a more casual basis. Of course, the Web is the place to find these opprtunities. Here are a few popular and ongoing Citizen Science projects and resources: y ScienceForCitizens.net is a good first stop. It is a comprehensive listing of Citizen Science projects, both large and small in scale. Site visitors can search the project database and sign up for an e-newsletter, and members can post blogs on the site. Popular projects include the Dragonfly Swarm Project, Texas Beewatchers, Project Budburst, and an online-only DNA game called Phylo. If you wish you could travel to outer space, check out Zooniverse, a collection of space and atmospheric science projects sponsored by the Citizen Science Alliance. The first Zooniverse project, called Galaxy Zoo, was launched in 2007 to help scientists with the daunting task of classifying galaxies. Galaxy Zoo participants have classified millions of galaxies and discovered two entirely new galaxy classifications, including star clusters called green peas and another called Hanny s Voorwerp that was named after the Galaxy Zoo volunteer who discovered it. Citizen Science Central is another centralized listing of Citizen Science projects generated by Cornell s Lab of Ornithology. You can search the listing by subject, such as Mammals, Birds, Plants, Invasive Species, and Climate Change. Project Noah, which stands for Networked Organisms and Habitats, is a Web-based tool that encourages members to document wildlife sightings using their mobile phone cameras. Members can join different missions, use the Project Noah site to document their wildlife sightings and communicate with other members, and download a wildlife identification app. Volunteers with the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project conduct weekly surveys of milkweed plants to identify Monarch Butterfly eggs and larva. The Lost Ladybug Project seeks to locate populations of native ladybug species that have become scarce in North America, like

the nine-spotted and two-spotted ladybugs. Participants search for ladybugs, then send in their photos and location data. Finally, those of you who think that hunting for ladybugs might be too much of a commitment should check out Project Squirrel. This one is really easy: The next time you see a squirrel, take a photo, jot down the time and place, and send your observations to the Project Squirrel site. You ve just become a Citizen Scientist.

That concludes Episode 1. Future episodes of Citizen Science 101 will look more closely at some of these Citizen Science projects and the organizations that sponsor them. Tune in to Episode 2, which will highlight a Citizen Science project that was custom-made for college students: the BioBlitz Project. Thanks for listening! (End)