Monthly Archive: April 2011

We are the answer: Crowdsourcing as a key to understanding the Earth

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April 20, 2011

April 20, 2011

The Museum of the City of New York has many historic images that they know little about – photographs depicting unknown buildings along unknown streets with unknown people milling about.  Yet, many of these images have been become less mysterious since the museum posted the images on their Facebook page and asked the public to help pinpoint the photo locations. People responded.  Some made guesses.  Others knew for sure where pictures had been taken.  Suddenly, the museum had on-the-ground reporters throughout the city who were able to contribute.

Why am I telling you, reader of the NEON blog, about historic photographs from one of the world’s most urbanized areas? Because it is a great example of crowdsourcing – the idea that we collectively may have answers that we individually do not.

We can potentially solve more complex problems as a group, and have new fresh ideas.  And by “we” I mean all of us, at least all of us who want to participate. Perhaps, just as people from all over New York are able to contribute to our collective understanding of the history of that city, people from all over the United States and Puerto Rico may be able to contribute to our collective understanding of large-scale ecology through NEON.

Citizen science programs, also known as public participation in scientific research (PPSR) or community science programs, are ways of crowdsourcing science research. These types of programs provide ways that everyone can get involved. Some people collect and report data about the natural world. Others help analyze or interpret data. Some people even help design scientific studies working directly with scientists.

Currently, the public engagement team at NEON is considering how to get the public involved with the NEON project though citizen science programs. I will post regular updates on the NEON blog as our plan for citizen science develops.

While we are developing NEON’s long-term plan for citizen science, we are getting our feet wet prototyping Project BudBurst, the citizen science campaign that now calls NEON home.  As we learn more about existing citizen science projects, I’m learning about the many ways people are contributing to our collective understanding of Earth.  I’ve started a blog on Talking Science called Citizen Science Buzz to share information about innovative citizen science projects. Talking Science, an educational web site run by the Science Friday Initiative, provides a multitude of science education resources for the public, students, and educators.

If you are interested in contributing to research projects as a citizen scientist, there are several excellent web sites where you can browse projects that need your help – including Citizen Science Central from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Science For Citizens and Citsci.org.

Lisa Gardiner is NEON’s Director of Education.

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Field trip! On learning from the specimen preservation experts

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April 7, 2011

April 7, 2011

For centuries, people have collected and preserved everything from birds to beetles to mice and mosquitoes. Well-preserved historical specimens are rich caches of information about everything from taxonomy to pollution to the spread of disease. As I wrote a few weeks ago, NEON will be collecting many thousands of specimens from carefully chosen groups of organisms to provide information about air, soil and water quality and about important ecosystem services like pollination and food production.

It’s a major undertaking just to collect, preserve and analyze that many specimens, and another enormous challenge to keep track of each specimen’s whereabouts and to make specimen data freely available to anyone who wants it. NEON biologists, computer scientists and web developers are busy setting up ways to coordinate the collection, preservation, and tracking of our specimens over the next 30 years. We’re aiming to sync with online specimen libraries like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Barcode of Life Datasystem so that people around the world can get at the data we’ve gathered. We also recently joined the Registry of Biological Repositories to help make our collections traceable from within NEON to their final homes in institutions across the country.

One institution in Boulder, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, already houses an old, extensive and beautiful collection of natural specimens.  The museum curators were kind enough to give a few dozen NEON employees a tour back in March. Some of us went to get a better sense of the art and science of natural collections keeping. But we all welcomed the opportunity to take a field trip away from the office and visit some furry, scaly, leafy and fossilized representatives of both ancient and recent residents of Earth.

I’ve put together a slideshow with photos and audio from the tour. In seven minutes, you can see most of what we spent well over an hour oohing and aahing over in the mammals and vertebrates collections. It’s too bad there wasn’t enough time for all of us to see all the natural treasures tucked away inside the museum walls.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.neonnotes.org/2011/04/field-trip-on-learning-from-the-specimen-preservation-experts/