{"id":953,"date":"2014-12-11T14:04:48","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T22:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unbc.ca\/huber\/?p=953"},"modified":"2014-12-11T14:04:48","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T22:04:48","slug":"citizen-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/?p=953","title":{"rendered":"Citizen science"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When I was in early elementary school I would spend afternoons catching grasshoppers on the bluff across the street from our house. I\u2019d bring them back to the house and meticulously color their forewings with a Sharpie. I\u2019d then take them back across the street to the hill and release them in the hopes of recapturing them on one of my next forays. I don\u2019t recall how I got it in my head to do this, and I certainly didn\u2019t know at the time that I could use the data from my mark-recapture experiment to determine population numbers. However, that was moot because I never did recapture a single specimen for all of my trying. I suspect that had to do with population numbers compared to my small marked cohort. Of course I didn\u2019t do the requisite control experiment for the effect of copious amounts of Sharpie ink on grasshopper behavior and survival either. So who knows.<\/p>\n

It might be argued that this was my first foray into (solitary) citizen science, of a sort. I was a citizen. I was attempting to do science (without a defined hypothesis). I am pretty sure that if I was a kid today I\u2019d be pretty excited about the many actual citizen science initiatives that are available. Heck, I\u2019m not a kid, but I am excited about them now.<\/p>\n

My first actual participation in a citizen science initiative \u2013 although I don\u2019t recall that jargon being used back then \u2013 was in the late-90s with SETI@home<\/a>. Very quickly after SETI@home started up I was quick on the draw to install the software on my Bondi blue iMac<\/a>. The system would download a packet of radio telescope data and then my computer would analyze it for non-random signals. It would send the analysis back to the SETI@home server and download a new packet to work on. The software ran as a screensaver on the iMac. The idea was that people could give up their unused CPUs and, with enough participants, crunch through radio telescope data faster than the fastest supercomputer at the time. I loved the idea of being involved in something bigger, and it made me very geeky about SETI in general. I read a ton of SETI books back then, likely a function of trying to avoid thesis writing<\/a>. I\u2019m still always game for a discussion about the finer points of the Drake Equation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If we back up even further, its easy to see that citizen science is even older than that. For instance the Christmas Bird Count<\/a> goes back over a hundred years<\/a>. It might be argued that what we call citizen science goes back centuries, if not millennia<\/a>. But in more recent years with the exponential development of the internet, citizen science has become a much bigger deal. So when Science Borealis asked us to think about the biggest thing in our field<\/a> over the past year, this was one of the things that came to my mind. Specifically, I am noticing citizen science really maturing and growing exponentially; some evidence of which is the increasing publication of peer reviewed articles stemming from such work. A simple Google Scholar search of \u201ccitizen science\u201d limited to 2014<\/a> pulls up well north of 2000 entries. And, because of their ubiquitous presence and importance in our lives, insects are often the subjects of this type of work.<\/p>\n

This expansion and maturation of citizen science hit me thrice this year. First, I was the academic editor on a cool PeerJ paper<\/a> that detailed data collection leading to a better understanding of invasive Asian camel crickets<\/a> in North America. Second, I heard a really cool talk by Dr. Claire Rutledge<\/a> (Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station) at the Entomological Society of Canada annual meeting about the use of wasps as a biomonitoring tool for emerald ash borer<\/a>. And third, I heard two separate talks by Dr. Elizabeth Elle<\/a> (Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Rob McGregor<\/a> (Douglas College) about the UNIBUG<\/a> work going on in the Greater Vancouver area.<\/p>\n

Several things strike me about these projects, and so many more like them:<\/p>\n