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

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.