When I was young and adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my simple response due to my love of Christa McAuliffe, Princess Diana, and the aunt I still look up to today was: princess/astronaut/teacher. In 1986, my elementary teacher rolled a TV into the Science Corner and my classmates and I tearfully watched Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher trained to go into space, die in the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. Due to the early development of a strong case of self-preservation, I narrowed my future career choices to just princess/teacher. In 2011 Prince William got married to Kate and I really wasn’t that in to Harry, so here I am, 20 years in to my teaching career. I love teaching. Let me clarify, I love teaching science. It’s such an exciting topic. However, if I had become a princess, I think I’d take up the cause of encouraging more students to enter careers in science. I’d probably spend the hours I was not parading around in a tiara on websites like citizenscience.org or scistarter.org being a princess/citizen scientist.
Me and my Tia Gloria
According to scistarter.org, citizen science is the public involvement in inquiry and discovery of new scientific knowledge. A citizen scientist is an individual who voluntarily contributes his or her time, effort, and resources toward scientific research in collaboration with professional scientists or alone. Various sources date the advent of citizen science in the mid to late 2000’s. The growing popularity of the Internet and its reach presented quite an amazing opportunity to scientists interested in collecting data from, well, everywhere! This movement had the potential to change how we do science. If you’ve taken a basic science course, you know that scientists must follow the scientific method. You also know that repeatability is very important and the analysis of extensive amounts of data lends validity to your conclusions.
Charles Darwin, the scientist who explained evolution by natural selection, was being trained for the ministry, but in his free time, he was an amateur naturalist who collected beetles in his back yard before embarking on a five-year collecting trip that would change his life. Your foray into citizen science may not lead to your name being honorably mentioned in science textbooks from now until the end of time for your contributions to the advancement of scientific thought, but you never know. In 2011, gamers using a citizen science program created by biochemists called Fold It, figured out a protein folding problem that had stumped AIDS researchers for years in just ten days!
I was first introduced to the concept of citizen science at a Howard Hughes Medical Institute teacher workshop at The American Museum of Natural History while using their HHMI Biointeractive app and website. After lunch, we were introduced to a program called Wild Cam Gorongosa. Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was a popular travel destination for safari trips in the 1950’s, but it experienced a massive decline in diversity due a civil war that lasted from 1981 to 1994. The park was shut down due to violence and animals were slaughtered to provide food for troops and ivory to be sold to buy guns and ammunition. The Carr Foundation/Gorongosa Restoration Project, began in 2004 with the goal of rebuilding the park's infrastructure, restoring its wildlife populations and spurring local economic development. To help with this effort, researchers set up motion detector cameras all over the Gorongosa National Park to detect the types, numbers and ages of animals and observe behaviors with the hope of using this information to determine how to best help return Gorongosa to its former biodiversity. The number of photos that the cameras were sending in was overwhelming. The number of hours that would be required to view all of the photos and determine if an animal was present, if it was a baby, and what it seemed to be doing when its photo was taken would have taken a lifetime and caused an eye-crossing migraine. Scientists designed a program to let citizens log in and collect and record data from the photos, quickly cutting down on the time researchers and their grad students had to stare at the screens to provide the information necessary for the rehabilitation and future monitoring of the National Park. Ten minutes on the site and I was hooked. I was a citizen scientist. I identified several baboons and kudu and what I think was a lion leg. No worries if you incorrectly identify an animal; you are not the only person looking at each photo. The program relies on several people reporting on each photo, thus eliminating reporting irregularities.
I can hear your excuses already… That’s boring. I’m too busy. I don’t like chemistry. I’m no good at statistics. I burned my Physics book as soon as I got my passing grade. None of these will hold up. There is a project for you. Do you live in the northeast and like birds? There is a project that will send you a backyard birdfeeder and food. All you have to do is take pictures of the birds that visit your backyard and send them in. Do you like long walks on the beach? There is a project that asks you to do just that and count the number of horseshoe crabs that cross your path as you meander along leaving footprints in the sand. Do you like food? Take a short anonymous on-line survey about your eating habits. Do you SCUBA dive? Report sightings of rare Hawaiian Hawksbill sea turtles during your upcoming Hawaiian vacation. I could go on, but I’ll leave you with this Princess Diana quote to inspire your choices: “Only do what your heart tells you.”
The good news for you fire fighter/NBA player/rock stars who are whittling your future career choices down to a sensible nine to five is that you can be a firefighter/scientist or an NBA player/scientist, or rock star/scientist. You can do this! You can do science. You can do science AND whatever professional occupation keeps the lights on, food on the table and a roof over your head. You can spend some of the hours you dedicate daily to social media time sucks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to citizen science. Your contributions will help researchers all over the world collect and analyze data. Nerds like me marvel at knowing that we are personally adding to the ever-growing body of knowledge. If you aren’t internally motivated by such intellectual pursuits, if nothing else, your participation in these research projects will give you a great conversation starter for first dates and dinner parties. Book mark these websites and once you’ve tackled your summer reading list and the chick–lit or mystery/thriller novel you’ve been reading on the beach comes to its perfect ending, entertain yourself with a couple of hours of citizen science. That’s what I’ll be doing this summer, in my tiara of course.