A typical scene for drilling a groundwater monitoring well. The big boom arm on the back of the truck runs the drilling augers. The drill bits used are hollow stem augers and allow for a hole to be drilled in the soil and the well to be constructed inside the augers. This is really entertaining stuff here. The cows could barely break away and only lost interest when the rancher brought them their lunch.

Water is extremely important to life on this planet. Finding freshwater is a challenge to many of the inhabitants on earth, particularly in poorer regions. Even though the surface of the earth is roughly 70 percent covered by water, the vast majority of this water is salty ocean water. Freshwater amounts to just three percent of the Earth’s total water, and about a third of freshwater is groundwater. Groundwater is an important part of our tiny usable water supply, and we need to monitor it.

The remainder of the soil boring with the PVC well casing inside the hole.

In mid-February, while many other people were wooing their significant others for Valentine’s Day, we were hard at work establishing the first portion of NEON’s groundwater observation well network. The first wells are part of the Central Plains region (Domain 10) and are situated around the Arikaree River in eastern Colorado. The site is a pristine grasslands area which has a gentle topography of rolling hills with a small portion of the Ogallala Formation present along the southern boundary.

NEON collaborated with the U.S. Geological Survey to install the wells at the site. Initial characterization of the site, performed by the USGS, used a combined geophysics approach to attempt to define the anticipated depth that we would need to drill the wells. In other words, we used electricity to look for water. For those of you who haven’t used electrical resistivity (a geophysics method) to study aquifers before, here’s how it works: We apply a small amount of electrical current to the soil though a pair of electrodes and measure the resulting electric potential at a separate set of electrodes. Several electrodes are positioned in a line and the current and electrode pairs are automatically swapped around many times through all the electrodes. If you do this enough, swapping the current pair of electrodes and potential pair, what you get are a set of measurements that yield a map of the soil’s ability to conduct electricity. We use a fancy numerical modeling technique called an “inversion” which takes the raw data that we collect from the electrodes and computes what the subsurface architecture must look like to yield the electrical signals we collected.

The reason this works so well is that water conducts electricity and we can “image” underground soils and soil moisture this using this technique. More accurately, we can use this technique to look for differences in the electrical conductance of the soil layers and make inferences as to where there is water or at least a shift in the underlying layers. We also make some eye-catching images.

The results of the inversion model for the site. The upper red and pink layers are the unsaturated dry soils and the top of the yellow band is where the water table is. The transition between the green and light blue layers is the thick clay layer before you reach bedrock. This image was the start of defining how deep the observation wells would need to be drilled to reach water.

Based on the geophysics analysis, we estimated that the thickness of the soil layer was about 30 feet. While drilling the wells we reached a thick clay layer at approximately 30 feet depth, marking the end of our drilling and also confirming the interpretations from the geophysics. At this site all the wells were drilled to approximately 30 feet deep as we encountered the clay layer at the same depth. The plan was to have a screened section of well (where the groundwater can enter and exit) long enough to capture the full seasonal and long-term oscillation of the groundwater table (fully water saturated soils).

Here is a quick conceptual drawing of the well.

We opted to install a protective steel casing around the PVC casing. A barbed wire fence was installed around the casing to keep the cattle away when they are being ranched in the research site area of the property.

In the coming months the NEON aquatic team will be installing sensors in the wells and in the stream to begin prototyping activities of the sensors and their data streams. Once we install water level sensors in the wells we’ll be able to track the oscillation of the groundwater table and will begin to establish the historical groundwater record in this region. The data collected through this network will establish a database that will allow local farmers to track the generalized effects of irrigation on groundwater levels in the region. This data will also be useful to the greater scientific research community as a part of the puzzle piece for examining continental scale ecological drivers and responses, among many other potential studies.

Stay tuned for more developments!

The first groups of projects cover an incredible range of topics, and are embracing a wide range of research approaches. In a pre-meeting survey, projects reported using simulation models, developing new theory, fitting empirical models to multi-scaled data, analyzing paleoecological data and implementing experiments across linked networks ofsites. Almost half the groups reflected the newness of the continental-scale approach by including significant educational activities.

The last half-day of the first Macrosystems Biology PI meeting took place at NEON HQ and packed our largest meeting room to the brim.

The meeting as a whole had a rough-and tumble flavor to it, as groups explored new ideas, exchanged ideas between groups and created new ideas from the fusion of each team’s perspectives. There was an unusually intense sense of intellectual ferment. I felt like I was seeing the early stages of a new approach to environmental science emerging.

Although the program is called “macrosystems”, most of the excitement was about working at multiple spatial scales. Researchers were making serious efforts to understand how influences crossed scales. Examples included how regional and global climate affected individual organisms, how local communities (present day and paleo) were affected by large-scale movement of organisms, and how those movements were affected by global climate and how the organismal biology of lakes varies across macroclimatic gradients. Although the NSF call emphasized the continental scale, most of the projects recognized that processes that play out over large areas also take a long time to play out, and so coupled time and space scales.

During the last half-day of the meeting, smaller groups met outside of NEON HQ to talk over ideas for an upcoming special issue of a journal …

Some of the commonalities were methodological. Very few of the projects could answer their questions with data and data analysis alone, and had to integrate theoretical and computational models with observations. Similarly, none of the projects could answer their questions with models alone, so some projects included large scale data-gathering efforts, while others were harvesting vast quantities of existing data from ongoing observations, experiments and data archives. Each project brought a data manager to the meeting, and so interwoven with the scientific discussion was a rich conversation about the new informatics and computation resources that exist or are needed.

Participants also addressed the culture of science. Data sharing was a common theme: scientists interested in studying the continent need to access data across many sites, and barriers to sharing data are barriers to them testing their hypotheses! The macrosystems teams spent a lot of time talking about how to share data technologically and also how credit can be given and shared in enterprises where a few creative individuals have an idea that requires harvesting data from tens or even hundreds of their colleagues. Most of the teams have plans to publish data so that it can be shared, cited and included in academic reward systems.

Collaboration was a related theme, and raised similar issues. How do we build teams that include the breadth of expertise needed to address big problems, allowing each member to contribute technical knowledge and leadership while sharing the credit? How can young scientists work in these exciting teams and still be recognized and promotable? Many macrosystems projects don’t emphasize collecting new data or plan to use data from the NEON facility. This implies a cohort of students who won’t conduct their own fieldwork in support of their dissertations. How will such students be received when they apply for jobs, and for promotion? There were no definitive answers, but a great conversation began, and some of the more senior participants were energized to raise the profile of these issues in their institutions!

Many of these issues will be discussed in a forthcoming special issue of a journal. Stay tuned for an exciting read!

Salmon Pond in Maine, one of the bodies of water from our study.

Just before I became a staff scientist at NEON, I and colleagues from the University of Colorado, Environmental Protection Agency, and University of Maine took a new a look at some long-term data to help answer a question that has been perplexing scientists for several decades: Why is the amount of dissolved organic matter (the stuff that gives water that brownish-yellowish tint) increasing in lakes and streams of the northeastern United States and Europe? Our study contributed to growing evidence suggesting that it’s a symptom of recovery from acid rain. It also highlighted the ability of environmental policy to impact ecosystem function and the importance of long-term monitoring initiatives, like NEON, to help society ensure basic ecosystem services like clean air and water.

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) forms from decomposing plants or from microbe secretions. It’s a hodgepodge of carbon-containing compounds that’s present in all natural waters and plays a critical role in many important processes within the environment, including serving as a microbial food source, maintaining the pH of aquatic ecosystems, and binding trace metals and pollutants. Changes in DOM have the potential to profoundly affect ecosystem function across large areas of the landscape.

Scientists have proposed numerous causes for increasing DOM including rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, climate warming, nitrogen deposition, and changing hydrology. However, several recent studies have concluded that increasing DOM is linked to changes in soil chemistry resulting from a decrease in acid precipitation facilitated by the Clean Air Act and Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the legislation that defines the Environmental Protection Agency’s responsibilities for protecting and improving our nation’s air quality.

My colleagues and I tested the hypothesis that increasing DOM is a sign of ecosystems recovering from acid precipitation. To do so, we used long-term lake and atmospheric chemical records and applied a new method, fluorescence spectroscopy, to re-analyze archived water samples collected from a series of lakes in Maine (mapped below) between 1993 and 2009.

View Maine Lakes from DOM/acid sensitivity study in a larger map

Fluorescence spectroscopy works by shining light through a water sample to collect data about the wavelength and intensity of the light emitted after passing through the water. This information can be used to determine the chemical composition and characteristics of DOM within the sample.

We used data from the National Atmospheric Deposition Program and the EPA’s New England Long Term Monitoring Program to look for regional trends in acid deposition. The data revealed that sulfate deposition (a major contributor to acid precipitation) declined significantly across the region of this study between 1980 and 2010 (below), while DOM increased in the majority of lakes over the same time period.

Sulfate deposition declined in all the study lakes during the 30-year study period. Click on the figure to see it full-size at the journal website.

After establishing that DOM increased while sulfate decreased, we were ready to re-analyze the archived samples we had obtained. Analyzing the samples using fluorescence spectroscopy and a measure called the Fluorescence Index (FI) allowed us to discern whether the DOM in archived samples was derived from terrestrial (think of leaves decomposing on the ground) or microbial (leached or secreted from microbes) sources.

Detecting changes in the source of DOM was critical to understanding if declining sulfate and acid rain are responsible for increasing DOM concentrations. Soil organic matter dissolves better under less acidic conditions; meaning that as these ecosystems recover from acid rain, terrestrial DOM production may increase. Eventually, this terrestrial DOM may make its way into streams and lakes resulting in a shift of the DOM signature to a more terrestrial FI.

Terrestrial DOM has a lower FI than microbial DOM. So, if decreased acid precipitation is leading to greater terrestrial DOM production, which is in turn being transported to surface waters, then archived lake samples would demonstrate a declining FI (i.e. more terrestrial) over time, right (see conceptual figure here)? And that’s exactly what we found.

The conclusions of our research support the hypothesis that increasing DOM in these lakes is the result of a decline in acid rain and subsequent ecosystem recovery due to the Clean Air Act. More importantly, these changes in DOM illustrate that the policy decisions we make, or don’t make, have the ability to alter atmospheric chemistry and the concentration of pollutants and impact ecosystem function.

This work also illustrates the importance of publicly funded long-term monitoring initiatives in providing data to inform current and future policy decisions. NEON will provide researchers and the public with data sets capable of answering similar questions but with many more variables, over longer time-scales and much greater geographic areas. An unprecedented, continental scale observatory like NEON will provide future researchers and the general public a framework for understanding changes in parameters ranging from atmospheric, aquatic and terrestrial chemistry to the spread of infectious disease. Furthermore, the thousands of data streams NEON plans to collect will allow us to forecast important ecological changes and may one day be used by future generations to answer questions that don’t even exist yet.

Many thanks to my co-authors Dr. Gretchen Oelsner, Dr. Diane McKnight, Dr. John Stoddard, and Dr. Sarah Nelson for their contributions to this work. We currently have another grant underway to further study the relationship between DOM and sulfate, but more about that later!

More information about this work in Chemical and Engineering News

The latest observations submitted to Project Budburst scroll through this box on the website like a ticker tape.

A quick look at the Project BudBurst ‘tickertape’ (right) tells me that in the past week first needles are appearing on Douglas-fir in Oregon City, OR; first flowers have been spotted on flowering dogwood in New Smyrna Beach, FL; sweetgum leaves are starting to unfold in Bakersfield, CA; and the common dandelion is making its appearance throughout the country. This continually updated, ticker-tape-like feature on our home page – Recent Reports – makes it easy to get a sense of what our observers around the country are seeing as many plants start to become active in response to the pending change in seasons. Recent Reports has become my very favorite feature to check out daily. It is rewarding to know that we are part of an active community dedicated to learning more about the stories plants can share with us.

A lot has changed in the five years since Project Budburst got underway. A quick stroll down memory lane is a good reminder that we started with a simple web site, data base, and very limited resources. We did not lack for people who brought a dedicated passion to make Project BudBurst succeed.

So, here we are, with spring 2012 marking our fifth year of full operation. It was not always easy as funding was never a sure thing. Moving to NEON in 2010 was a turning point for Project BudBurst and its community. NEON has provided us with a foundation and has encouraged us to expand to meet the needs of our growing and dedicated community. Best of all, the Project BudBurst data is being used in both scientific and educational applications!

A graduate student and his mentor log an early Project Budburst observation in Boulder, CO.

In 2012, we’re expanding, with new features such as online courses, a Cherry Blossom Blitz, and an updated mobile app.

Just last month, we opened the first Project BudBurst online course for K-12 and informal educators and have two more offered before June. All online courses are already full. The online courses are part of the new NEON Citizen Science Academy that will be offering five online courses by summer 2012.

If cherry blossoms signal spring for you, check out the new Cherry Blossom blitz. From March 20 – April 30, while people are enjoying the showy flowers, we want them to report what their cherry trees are doing. This campaign is an easy way to get many people involved in citizen science by recording a single, simple observation of a familiar plant. What’s more, many people’s observations of the same plant at the same time in different conditions and locations across the entire country provide an especially useful data set for scientists.

Your local cherry blossom festival is a fine place to observe plant phenology. Photo by Ashley Bradford

Finally, we’ve been working with UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing on the next version of our Android mobile phone app, which is now available. The iPhone app is in development and coming soon. Smartphones support data collection in the field and make it easy for the person on the run to share their observations quickly and accurately.

Happy Birthday to Project BudBurst and the community that makes it possible. This is going to be the best year ever for PBB and its extraordinary community of observers and partners. To get a peek at the folks who are keeping us updated on Douglas-fir in Oregon City; flowering dogwoods in Florida; and dandelions everywhere, check out our new Community Attribution page. Project BudBurst would not be celebrating any birthdays or milestones without the dedication of our committed observers. Thanks to all for making this 5th year possible. I will end this blog with a Haiku for the Project BudBurst Community:

Five years watching plants
Timing of flowers and leaves
Our Community!

In reality, the Second Annual Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill was filled with much less drama and was far more enjoyable. NEON collaborated with twelve other scientific societies to bring climate scientists to Washington and facilitate communication with policy makers. NEON sponsored six of the thirty participating scientists and also took a lead role in organizing the event. While the expertise of the scientists spanned a breadth of climate science disciplines, we all descended on the Capitol armed with one message: “please talk to climate scientists about climate science.” It seemed like a very simple and obvious message, but it was surprising how critical it really was.

Meet and Greet in Senator Udall’s office for 2012 Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill. Left to Right: Jack Hess, Geological Society of America; Ellen Klicka, American Meteorological Society; Amy Braverman, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Senator Mark Udall (D-CO); me; Rachel Gallery, University of Arizona; Brian Wee, NEON. Photo from Mark Udall’s staff.

The day before the actual event at the Capitol, we visited the American Association for the Advancement of Science for a briefing on what we should expect. While I prepared myself for a tedious afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was very engaged by the discussion. Ed Maibach, Director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, gave an excellent presentation about the challenges of communicating climate science in a policy forum, while a panel of four different Congressional staffers (two Democratic and two Republican) discussed the different perspectives of their parties and their bosses. For the most part, their messages focused on the fact that the climate is not a hot topic right now as Congress is focused on the upcoming budget and this year’s election.

As regular NEON blog readers will know, communicating climate science is something about which I’m quite passionate but, as I quickly learned, communicating with policy makers is a whole new ball game.

Climate science is often obfuscated by ad hominem attacks and can get very confusing for a non-scientist. Take this same topic to Capitol Hill and it can often find itself mired in partisan politics, so much so that each side of the Senate floor sent their own video presentation to the most recent UN Climate Change talks in Durban, South Africa.

Regardless of their political views and party positions, all of the politicians that I met did uniformly have one thing in common: they genuinely cared about the well-being of their constituents. This fact allowed us to find the common ground necessary to facilitate real communication: discussing the impacts of climate change in their community resonated with everyone that I met.

As you can imagine, Capitol Hill is a very busy place and many different people/groups/organizations are vying to get the attention of our legislators. At the previous day’s briefing, we were told to expect that our meetings would be short and staffers/legislators would most likely be distracted. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Everyone we met was very engaged and several people spoke to us for close to an hour. BlackBerrys were always turned off and the dialogue was very polite and respectful. From both sides of the aisle, our message of “please talk to us” was well received and appreciated.

In fact, one Republican team that has been known to not be very supportive of climate science was very happy to speak with us. They discussed their concerns about impacts in their community and the struggle to decipher fact from fiction in the climate science debate. Our offer to assist them in their understanding by providing knowledge and professional comments on studies in their region was genuinely welcomed. In fact, our message of “please contact us with questions” has already resulted in some follow-up dialogue which we hope to cultivate.

Amid the often emotional debates of Capitol Hill, we managed to make a connection with our legislators. Making ourselves available as resources appears to be the key to enhancing climate science communication with policymakers. I’ve already requested to participate in next year’s Climate Science Day – and I encourage all other climate scientists to do so as well.

NEON is being constructed in response to these growing challenges of multiple stresses and multiple scales in ecosystem science. Such challenges can be addressed by large, integrated projects and well-funded teams, but NEON provides another model. NEON is often considered a “big science” project. In fact, it is a large user facility that supports individual PIs and students, as well as small and large teams equally!

Science user facilities provide resources that can be efficiently shared over many investigators and educators, or are too costly for individuals or institutions to maintain. Such facilities also make state-of-the-science capabilities accessible to a wide range of users.

As a user facility, NEON provides free and openly available data and a variety of other resources for use by the public:

• Data over space and time.
  NEON data are focused on multiple stresses (climate, land use and invasive species) and on many key responses at the ecosystem and species level. Individual researchers and small teams can simply use these data, or embed targeted studies in this large information base and make use of NEON observations of drivers of change. For example, a researcher or group of researchers interested in the spread of invasives across a specific landscape can request the NEON airborne remote sensing system be deployed to their study area, and gain access to a multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art system.
• Project management.
  On even larger scales and longer terms, scientists can request relocatable deployments to address emerging, important questions with the NEON facility providing the wide range of disciplines needed to implement such observations as well as covering the sustained costs and labor to maintain quality data over years to decades. This relieves a PI from the common dilemma of choosing between devoting themselves to maintaining a study and spending much of their time on fundraising and logistics. Instead, these functions are carried out by expert professionals, and the PI need only analyze the data that results.
• State of the art infrastructure.
  The scale, duration and ambition of individual or team projects can be greatly increased by access to a user facility. The PI or his/her institution need not own and maintain costly equipment or maintain costly facilities in the field. Instead, by sharing the user facility, researchers gain as much access to that capability as needed and for as long as needed. Access to state-of-the-art capability also levels the playing field between large, well-funded institutions, and smaller institutions without resources to provide large start-up packages.
• Advancing educational resources and broadening participation.
  User facilities can greatly increase the diversity of scientists doing world-class ecological science. User facilities enable PIs at undergraduate institutions to conduct world class research, and they are available to researchers at HBCU institutions and EPSCOR states. Facilities also allow young scientists to gain experience with world-class data and instrumentation that was not part of their training. This model works in other fields such as oceanography and astronomy, where primarily undergraduate institution faculty are often leaders in their disciplines.

While scientists often focus on the cost of facilities, the scientists who integrate NEON into their research gain access to capability far more costly than typically covered in research projects. This expanded access to research capability has the potential to greatly increase the diversity of the field and expand the number of people who can contribute. As ecologists seriously begin to address ecology at the continental scale, the comprehensive data, spatial extent and remote sensing technology will allow a large and diverse user community to tackle new questions at scales not accessible to previous generations of ecologists.

And so, with not a moment to spare, let the building begin.

The team of researchers and community members that make up the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA) have been thinking about the idea of community for quite some time. The mission of ELOKA is to provide data management services and user support to facilitate the collection, preservation, exchange, and use of local observations and knowledge of the Arctic. I recently had the privilege of attending one of ELOKA’s rare face-to-face workshops here in Boulder, CO, and what I took away was an experience I wish everyone at NEON and in the scientific community could have at least once during their career.

Jay Hootch and Earl Alstrom (Yupiit of Andreafski Environmental Program) and Gretta Pecl (The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia) engage in discussions at the ELOKA Workshop. Photo credit: Chris McNeave. Courtesy ELOKA

The attendees at the Boulder conference were from more than 9 countries on 4 continents, from research institutions and small villages. Some were social scientists, some were hard scientists and some were citizen scientists. Some were not scientists at all. Most spoke English, and several did not. A few spoke it only as a second language. One attendee had never before traveled outside his village community in Russia, but made the trek to the United States just for this conference. Such is the ‘community’ that makes up ELOKA. This diverse community is united by their shared love of the Arctic, their concern about the changes they see taking place there, and a strong desire to communicate with one another and the world as a whole about their experiences.

The challenge with any large collaboration like ELOKA is to figure out who actually makes up your community and what drives them to do what they do. The scientific community and the community of ELOKA, for example, are not one and the same. The ELOKA community is made up of a diverse group of peoples of which the scientific community is one piece, no less or more important than the other pieces. ELOKA works to help the scientific members of their community reach their goals while simultaneously working to help the tribes, social scientists, and other members of the community reach their goals.

Alaska Community Member Olia Sutton teaches Jeff Braucher (National Snow and Ice Data Center) the “how to’s” on operating an Arctic Yo Yo. Photo credit: Chris McNeave. Courtesy ELOKA

To make all of this work takes a significant investment of time on the part of everyone involved. Time is invested to build relationships between local tribes and researchers. Time is invested to work through and understand the cultural and language differences among groups. Time is invested to develop strategies that ensure that all parties benefit from a given project. Once solid relationships are built, for example, tribes may choose to provide scientific researchers with data about ocean wildlife populations previously undocumented by scientists. The scientists, in turn, may utilize the new data to improve hunting and fishing regulations imposed on the tribes. By working with local tribes, scientists can supplement their research with rich natural history data they would never be able to gather in the short span of a grant funded project. The tribes benefit when the scientists provide them with a voice to share their knowledge of areas like the arctic with the world through online resources, scientific publications, databases, maps, and more (for example, From the Ice into the Computer and Back)

With an audience as diverse in disciplines and life experiences as those in the ELOKA conference room, I expected to hear some unique talks and to participate in some interesting discussions. One after another, presenters stood and discussed their experiences bringing together diverse groups of people to collect better, more informed, scientific data from the Arctic and engage local communities in the scientific process, often in ways that benefited members of the communities as well. I was not disappointed. Martin Nweeia and David Angnatsiak, presented research on narwhal tusk function that hinged on successful collaborations between Harvard University researchers and local elders and hunters of the High Arctic. Tero Mustonen discussed the pan-Arctic Snowchange Cooperative based in Finland in which grandmothers from the nomadic Chukchi communities in arctic Russia were sent to the Barefoot College in India to learn how to bring solar electricity to their nomadic camps. Finn Danielsen discussed the challenges and benefits of community-based documentation and management of living resources in North West Greenland.

The collaborations, communications, and open exchanges of ideas were inspiring. In the breakout discussions scattered throughout the three day conference, I listened to attendees criticize each other’s point of views without condescension, hold heated disagreements in which both parties still managed to maintain a decorum of respect, and watched attendees come to new understandings about the challenges facing each of us at the table. After three days, all of us were exhausted, but I doubt anyone left with the same understanding of the Arctic that they arrived with.

As we work to communicate science and develop community here at NEON, my hope is that we can replicate what ELOKA has done so well already. As the NEON community works to share science and ideas in an open, engaging, and collaborative way, we will advance our understanding of NEON science in ways we are not yet able to imagine and discover new information that we, as individuals, could not discover alone. Therein lies the unique strength of NEON science. Therein lies the challenge.

“Backyard Birds Open a Window on Science”: A recent centerfold in BirdScope magazine celebrates Project FeederWatch. View the full version (and download the poster version) here. Poster designed by Diane Tessaglia-Hymes and Joanne Avila; Illustrations by Larry McQueen, Evaristo Hérnandez-Férnandez; and Evan Barbour.

On a frosty weekend morning in December, I headed out the door before the crack of dawn to count birds for the day. Some of you might think that choosing to hang outside in freezing winter weather all day and NOT skiing is a good indication of eccentricity or the affliction of being an ecologist. But you must believe me when I tell you that I was not driven by any behavioral or professional abnormality to count birds on that day. This winter, I was one of not tens, not even thousands, but tens of thousands of people (people who love the birds – amateurs and pros alike) who participated in the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count throughout North America.

So now maybe you think that all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is turning people into crazy birders. But, in fact the CBC began in 1900, back when carbon dioxide was well below 300 parts per million.

Chickadees. From ‘American Birds’ (1908). Photo by William Lovell Finley/Courtesy OSU Archives.

The story goes that, back in the olden times (technically referred to as the 19th century), Christmas was celebrated by many with a hearth-warming game of ‘who can shoot the most endotherms (i.e., birds and mammals)?’ At the turn of the last century, however, conservation efforts were on the rise, due in part to the precipitous decline of many species. The year 1900 is not only the year the CBC began; it also marks the passage of the Lacey Act, the ‘first far-reaching federal wildlife protection law’ in the US. passed during Republican William McKinley’s administration). The founder of the CBC, Frank M. Chapman, lived through the catastrophic decline of both the passenger pigeon and the American bison. It is hard to conceive of such a dramatic change in the ecological landscape that resulted from the loss of these highly visible species.

In that context, Frank Chapman initiated a large effort to establish long-term monitoring of birds throughout North America on the same day each year. An obstacle to accomplishing this ambitious goal was, of course, the limited availability of person-hours of knowledgeable observers. At that time, the number of professional naturalists was extremely limited (many would argue that it still is). The only federally-employed naturalists were affiliated with the National Biological Survey’s Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, which had been established only in 1886.

Fortunately, birds are beautiful, relatively easy to see, especially with the aid of low-tech binoculars, often sing using species-specific songs, and are active during the day (when people also tend to be active). Because of this powerful combination of traits, there were then, as there are today, folks who were not employed as naturalists but who dedicated much of their free time to learning how to identify birds by sight and song. Although we refer to these dedicated people as amateurs, this term is no indication of knowledge and ability; it means only that they aren’t paid for their many hours of hard work.

In 1900, Chapman was able to garner the efforts of 27 volunteers to count birds on Christmas Day at 25 sites throughout the US and Canada. This year, as I mentioned above, tens of thousands people counted birds in a standardized way for one day during the official count period (Dec 14 – Jan 05) at over at more than 2000 sites throughout North and South America (see map here). These efforts, as with other citizen science projects, provide vastly more valuable data for scientists and policy makers to use to understand the status of bird populations than would otherwise be feasible for the professionals to collect. Ornithologists are particularly fortunate in this regard, since the sheer quantity of amateur birders throughout the world allows for a good number of bird-related citizen science efforts, including eBird, the Breeding Bird Survey, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and Project FeederWatch to name a few.

But enough about history and the great work that millions of dedicated birders do for the world. Let’s get back to me. Although I was whining earlier about braving the cold for the sake of the birds, I and my fellow birders conducting the count for the Boulder, CO, count circle (each CBC site is actually a circle with a 15 mile diameter) were ultimately treated to a beautiful sunny day with a high in the mid-50s (degrees Fahrenheit). Each CBC count circle is surveyed for as much of a day by as many people as are willing. In populated areas with good road access throughout the circle, many people count the area intensively – for example, in Boulder, over 100 observers tallied 112 species on count day. My team of 4, led by fellow biologist Pete Plage, spent a full 12 hours combing an area of about 2 x 4 miles, and counted 43 of these species. I think it’s pretty cool that that many species can be seen in one small suburban area over the course of one day in the middle of winter, and in an area with a surprisingly low density of backyard feeders.

The Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto), an invasive species that appears to be on the rise in Boulder. Photo by Shanthanu Bhardwaj. Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0

Although my favorite part of the day was the pair of Great Horned Owls sitting close to one another nestled in a bushy conifer (or was it the white-breasted nuthatch?), the most notable result from my team’s endeavors was the highest count of Eurasian Collared Doves for the Boulder count area. This species is considered an invasive species, because it was introduced to the Bahamas in the 1970s, spread to Florida in the 1980s, and then began spreading rapidly throughout North America since the 1990s. The Eurasian Collared Dove has only been seen in the last five counts in this area, and its population in Boulder seems to be on the rise. This result highlights one of the many significant contributions to science that citizen science projects make. The contributions that have been made because of citizen science and the as yet untapped potential of these information are too numerous to enumerate here. But it could be a good topic for another blog post…

The blog also has a new address to match its new name: www.neonnotes.org. Through the magic of databases and WordPress, you’ll still find the same high-quality content that was at blog.neoninc.org last year. Your old bookmarks will still work for now, but we strongly encourage you to update your bookmarks, as we will be retiring the old blog any day now.

Thanks for reading! And have a joyful, productive New Year.