Warning: a little shameless self-promotion here. We loved this write up about our site and participation in the World Maker Faire last month. This blog post is currently featured on Wired.com’s popular GeekDad blog. Here’s a snippet:

“While at the World Maker Faire my daughter had a chance to sort through the matrix from a mastodon found in upstate New York. The project was part of the booth being run by Science for Citizens, a website that lets people volunteer to help scientists collect and analyze data on different projects across multiple disciplines. Looking for an outdoor project in your area? The websites has a search that lets you choose from a number of criteria including whether the project is suitable for children…..Science for Citizens is doing a great job of tapping into the vast network of people who are interested in science and craving more participation than just reading about it.”

Read the full piece here.

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This year's Snowmastodon Project got citizen scientists and researchers working together to uncover a wealth of fossils near Aspen, CO.

This post was originally published on Citizen Science Buzz, a blog on TalkingScience that highlights science projects that are helping us better understand our planet and the Universe.

During the last Ice Age, mammoths and mastodons roamed Florida. Today, fossil hunters like James Kennedy of Vero Beach, Florida find their bones.

“I’m not a scientist,” said James in a recent interview for National Public Radio. “I just go out and dig up bones good. I’m good at finding them.”

But I’d contend that James is a scientist – a citizen scientist.

Many people collect fossils. I like to think of these fossil hunters as “citizen paleontologists” and they can play important roles in scientific discovery.

For example, one of the bones James collected is more than just a fossil. It’s also prehistoric art. An image of a mammoth is engraved on the bone. Scientists estimate that the engraving was made at least 13,000 years ago. It’s an important clue to how humans lived at the time.

Several research projects are combining the skills and interests of citizen paleontologists with those of scientists in order to help us understand more about earth’s history and evolution.  Here are a few examples of projects that are getting citizens and researchers working together and leading to scientific discoveries.

The Snowmastodon Project:

This summer, high in the Rocky Mountains, not far from the town of Aspen, Colorado, local teachers and college students worked side-by-side dozens of scientists and museum staff to uncover a multitude of fossils of Ice Age animals like mastodons out of the rock. The project scientists got much needed help with the dig. The volunteers got real‐world experience with the science happening right in their own backyard.

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Energy is a strange thing.  It floats around you, fills you up until you’re about ready to burst, and then it skips off, leaving you to keep up as best you can.  Last Thursday and Friday were two full days of such energy, when 60 professionals from such exotic places as Alaska, Colombia and New Jersey got together to discuss why and how public participation in scientific research (PPSR) is necessary if we are to save the world’s biodiversity.  The amazing thing about this workshop wasn’t so much that these people had a similar goal (after all, who doesn’t want to save the world?), but rather that the participants brought such a diversity of backgrounds, academic disciplines and institutions to the table.

Although the participation of citizens in scientific research goes back centuries, it is only very recently that there has been a push and pull from many different areas, leading to an amazing expansion of this kind of research and a demand for new ideas, ways to engage, and methods to understand how and why this can ultimately lead us forward in conservation.  The 50+ projects that were represented during this workshop illustrated this expansion not only by what they had in common – citizen engagement, data collection, and links to better conservation management – but also by what they didn’t.  While some projects, like FrogWatch USA or Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, invite participants from across the United States to collect data on a wide geographical scale, other projects such as Ndee bini’ bida’ilzaahi (Pictures of Apache Land) and the Fresno Bird Count are place-specific, uniquely adapted to the needs of their local community and natural environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a convenient way to identify birds during your next citizen science excursion? Consider the WildLab Bird iPhone app, which uses photographs, audio, and maps to help you determine which bird you’ve spotted and makes it easy to share the observation with researchers at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.

Here’s how it works: Visit the WildLab project description in the Sci4Cits project finder, where you’ll find links to download the app and start a free WildLab account. Using the app, choose the type of habitat where you are, then pick a silhouette like that of the bird you’ve sighted. Next, the app lets you scroll through pre-loaded images of birds and select the one that most closely resembles the bird you’ve spotted. Just to be sure you have the right one, you can also hear the bird’s song and see a map of its range. When you click the “submit” button, your observation, along with date, time, and location, is saved to your online WildLab account. From there, you can create a record of sightings to upload into Cornell’s eBird database. Simple as that.

While you’re on the WildLab site, be sure to check out the free supplemental materials aligned to curricula and educational activities.

In the near future, the WildLab plans to release an app for monitoring horseshoe crabs–sure to be a big hit with fans of those critters (like me!). We’ll let you know when that app is available.

This week, an article in the Charlotte Observer newspaper featured citizen scientist Benton Bragg and his family. The Braggs installed a video camera in an owl box to track the habits of the owl and her babies.

“We never know what we’re going to see,” Bragg said. “One night she brought in seven snakes. Another night it was salamander night. Once, she brought in what I think was one of my brother’s chickens.”