Author: guest

Izaak Walton League Celebrates Citizen Science Month With Project To Document Streams Across America By Danielle Donkersloot, Izaak Walton League Clean Water Program Director Every American has the right to know whether the streams running through their backyards and neighborhood parks are safe. But there is an alarming lack of up-to-date information about water quality across […]

Who really benefits from citizen science? How can citizen science support STEM education?  How do we bring citizen science to new audiences? How can we leverage new technologies to expand student participation in citizen science projects? These were some of the questions we set out to discuss at the Citizen Science Meet-up at SXSWedu. SXSWedu […]

By Lishka Arata, Conservation Educator at Point Blue Despite the current administration’s efforts to roll back the Clean Water Act and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, interest and participation is growing in a new EPA- and stakeholder-led citizen science project that aims to inform clean water management. The Cyanobacteria Monitoring Collaborative has been gathering steam […]

By: Marc J. Kuchner Eighty-seven years ago, this week, Clyde Tombaugh was poring over a pair of photographic plates, hoping to change the world.  He was staring hard into an arcane device called a blink comparator, which allowed him to rapidly switch from viewing one image to the next. In those days before computers, that was […]

By: Ayla Fudala If you’ve ever seen bees flying around at night, there’s a good chance they’re so-called “ZomBees”—honey bees whose brains are under the control of tiny fly larvae growing inside their bodies. Yes, you read that correctly.

By Adam Reyer, Project Director for Global Fishing Watch Hundreds of millions of people depend on the ocean for their livelihoods, and almost 3 billion rely on it as a protein source. But countless threats — overfishing, destructive fishing practices, bycatch, dishonest catch reporting, habitat destruction — threaten our oceans and the people who depend […]

Guest blog post from Charles Ault, Superstition Area Land Trust (SALT) community. SALT Citizen Science program emerges in East Valley. Rhythms of Desert Citizen Science program examines the effects of El Niño on our climate. Four organizations dedicated to advancing scientific research, public policy,  and community-based decision making, have come together to develop a program that harnesses the […]

By: Lishka Arata Many things distinguish penguins from rocks. There’s color difference (usually), behavior (penguins waddle, rocks don’t), social structure (rocks don’t have one) — the list goes on. But why might someone need to distinguish between rocks and penguins? It’s a skill central to a long-term project that relies on citizen scientists, working from […]

By: Elizabeth Kittrie, Senior Advisor for Data Science, National Institutes of Health In the spirit of open science – a movement to make data and other information from scientific research available to everyone — the National Institutes of Health invites you to cast your vote and help us decide which of the projects competing for […]

By Lea Shell Middle school students are presented with a bucket of what, at first glance, looks like dirt. They pull handfuls onto their lab bench and carefully begin to sift. “I found a shark tooth!” one student exclaims,  prompting the other students to peer more intently at their own piles. Before long, they see […]