Crowd-sourced science: Citizen scientists are crucial to many experiments

photo Bill Haley, Tennessee Aquarium education director and president of the Tennessee Valley chapter of the North American Butterfly Association, examines a butterfly with a citizen scientist volunteer during an all-day butterfly count earlier this year.

Get involved: A sample of citizen science projectsChristmas Bird CountSince 1900, the National Audubon Society has coordinated this event within two weeks of Christmas Day. Volunteers count all the birds they can see within designated circles that are 15 miles in diameter. Counts help scientists track disruptions in migration and identify problems such as polluted wetlands.Next week, go to birds.audubon.org/get-involved-christmas-bird-count-find-count-near-you for bird-counting locations.Sunny Pasture or Wind-Whipped Cliff?Research in flower-dotted meadows is a perk of the North American Butterfly Association's Butterfly Count. Tennessee Aquarium Education Director Bill Haley is also president of the Tennessee Valley chapter of the butterfly association and, as a citizen scientist, tracks nature's most beautiful bugs."The chapter did eight all-day butterfly counts this past spring, summer and fall to monitor butterfly populations," he says. "These counts measure both seasonality, abundance and species distribution. Most counts number 30 to 50 species. We've been doing butterfly counts around the Chattanooga area for 20 years now."Volunteers count the butterflies within designated circles that are 15 miles in diameter and all within a 50-mile radius of Chattanooga. For information, go to tvcnaba.org/Home/CountsHawk WatchHaley is also a volunteer who spots and counts for the Soddy Mountain Hawk Watch, and he would love for more citizen scientists to join up and help him out. The project is for the bold mountain lover, however."The Soddy Mountain hawk lookout is located in Southeast Tennessee on the eastern face of Walden's Ridge in Hamilton County," Haley explains in his introduction to the project. "There are currently no restroom or eating facilities nearby. Hawk watchers are advised to bring their own folding lawn chair, sunscreen, hat and drinking water. There is no fence to prevent a fall off the nearby 75-foot bluff ... No shelter is available ... The climb to the watch site is up a steep bank about 8 feet high."OK, that sounds fun. But here's the payoff, on one recent afternoon, Haley spotted eight sharp-shinned hawks, 23 red-shouldered hawks, two Northern Harriers, a Cooper and an immature golden eagle soaring and wheeling around him. Another citizen scientist spotted five bald eagles. Those sights can get a devoted bird watcher up a mountain.For information, go to soddymountainhawkwatch.blogspot.com.Cloud LoversNASA's SkyScience project has the goal of making weather satellites more accurate and increasing understanding of how clouds reveal climate changes on Earth. Satellites capture images of clouds from above but "your role is to provide ground truth for satellite data by making observations from the ground," the NASA mission statement explains.At the SkyScience website, a map will give you the latitude (north/south) and longitude (east/west) of your town. Once you've determined that, you can choose one of three satellites to track: Aqua, Terra or Suomi. NASA emails you a schedule of the exact times your satellite is over your city. Just go outside at that time and describe clouds you see. NASA has an online journal for you to use.To join the SkyScience project, go to go.nasa.gov/skysci.Backwards in TimeThe Old Weather project can be done in front of a cozy fireplace while sipping hot chocolate. Citizen scientists read logs kept by sea captains of 19th-century ships, including some that explored the Arctic. The website has online forms for volunteers to transcribe observations made by the captains about vegetation, wildlife and weather. Scientists will use those observations to build computer models of how climate, environment and weather evolved historically. Historians will use the transcripts to track ship movements and tell the crew members' and passengers' stories.And those stories should be amazing. This was the era when the East India Co. was exploring Africa and Asia, and ships risked being torn to bits by ferocious storms near South America's southernmost point, Tierra del Fuego. The project recently expanded to include late 19th- and early 20th-century Antarctic expeditions."We feed citizen scientists data into one of our computer models of the atmosphere, and out of that comes a 3-D global weather map," explains Philip Brohan, who founded Old Weather for Britain's Royal Meteorological Society, in the mission statement. "If we're worried about extreme weather -- unusual events, very large heat waves -- that perspective, that extra length of our records, gives us more information about how likely events are to occur in the future."For more information, go to oldweather.org.

Astronomer Chris Lintott realized his job of searching through thousands of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope images was hopelessly overwhelming, so he called for help from geeks worldwide.

"I have too many galaxies on my hands," he explained when he launched the Galaxy Zoo Project three years ago, a program still thriving today.

So-called "citizen scientists" who volunteer to help Lintott do it for free first take an online tutorial, teaching them what to look for when they examine the Hubble photos they are given. Then they dive in.

Since Galaxy Zoo began, citizen scientists have thrilled NASA officials by discovering a cluster of pea-green galaxies, each galaxy one-tenth the size of the Milky Way. Using Hubble photos, they also have discovered new stars, ringed planets and comets.

"Citizen scientists have classified galaxies, discovered planetary disks and measured craters on the moon," says NASA climate and radiation scientist Lin Chambers.

Doing what is also known as crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science and networked science, dedicated volunteers are critical because they "provide observations from a large number and a wide range of places, which would never be possible to do using only paid scientists," she says.

And they are used in all sorts of sciences, from astronomy to zoology, from meteorology to botany and genetics. The Science at Home project, run by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Denmark's Aarhus University, is using citizen scientists to do quantum mechanics research through the online game called Quantum Moves.

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, called the "the father of sociobiology" and "the father of biodiversity," described citizen scientists as "the most crucial form of crowdsourcing" at a time when science is enduring governmental budget and staff cuts.

University of Oxford astrophysicist Afron Smith concurred. Smith is helping with the Old Weather project, which requires scientists to pore through thousands of entries made in the logbooks of 19th-century ship captains as they encountered rogue waves, icebergs, squalls and fair weather.

Smith noted that it is easy for a hellishly overworked researcher to mistakenly transcribe the wrong temperature reading when plowing through hundreds of pages. But if that poor researcher is aided by science-loving volunteers on the Internet, "between us we're probably going to get the right answer" because those volunteers are cross-checking his work constantly with fresh eyes.

NASA's Chambers currently is relying on citizen scientists to feed her data for a project observing clouds to better understand how they affect the climate of Earth. As part of the project, NASA is approaching students, asking them to become a "roaming S'Cool Cloud Observer," or Rover.

"You will collect data on cloud type, height, cover and related conditions," the NASA website says. "Your observations help us to validate satellite data and give us a more complete picture of clouds in the atmosphere and their interactions with other parts of the integrated global Earth system. ... Reports from a wide range of locations are helpful to assess the satellite data under different conditions."

Chambers hopes volunteers in the project can help answer such questions as: How often does a satellite miss thin cirrus clouds? Does snow on the ground get mistaken for low clouds? How often?

"Clouds are the most important variable in refining predictions of future climate change, so we need every bit of information we can get to understand them," she says.

While cloud lovers have a fairly easy gig as volunteers -- mostly looking up -- other citizen scientists like the Tennessee Aquarium's Bill Haley are willing to perch on an unfenced, 75-foot-tall bluff, winter wind blasting by, and count hawks. One could wonder why he does it for free.

"It is so worthwhile; the magic comes when a bald eagle flew by at eye level and looked right at me," Haley says. "I've had experiences hawk counting that no one can have anywhere else. I do it because I feel like the data I collect contributes to a good cause."

Contact Lynda Edwards at ledwards@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6391.

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