Breaking News

These are the 20 best travel destinations for summer 2024, according to Google Flight Searches 3 Google Maps updates to make summer travel easier SPACECENT is up the new war zone > United States Space Force > Article Display Tuberculosis — United States, 2023 | MMWR Thousands of US bridges are vulnerable to collapse from a single hit: NTSB Why don’t the Blazers or ROOT Sports offer standalone streaming? Up to 200,000 people estimated to travel to Vermont for total solar eclipse How fast will April’s total solar eclipse travel? The UN Security Council demands a ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan Mexico in the emerging world order

A community scientist uses a sky quality meter to measure light pollution at night.Credit: Emily Maletz

For Greg Pauly, inspiration came in the form of roadkill.

Jogging in Los Angeles, California, about ten years ago, Pauly, the curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was shocked to see a Southern California legless lizard ( Anniella stebbinsi) is hit by a car. “I couldn’t believe that this particular species of lizard would be in that neighborhood,” he recalls.

What else could be lurking in the back gardens of Los Angeles? And how could Pauly find out, since much of the crowded county is private property, inaccessible to scientists? Then Pauly had an epiphany. “All people are not the problem – all people are the solution,” he says.

Since 2013, Pauly has been involved in a community science project using the natural history app iNaturalist. His network of 9,000 contributors and more has accumulated more than 60,000 sightings of reptiles, which allow him to identify and destroy invasive species, observe rare alligator-lizard mating (Elgaria multicarinata) and publish more than a dozen papers.

In community science, also called participatory science, non-professionals contribute their time, energy or expertise to research. (The term ‘citizen science’ is also used but can be perceived to exclude non-citizens.)

Whatever name is used, the approach is more popular than ever and even has journals dedicated to it. The number of annual publications mentioning ‘citizen science’ went from 151 in 2015 to more than 640 in 2021, according to the Web of Science database. Researchers from physiologists to paleontologists to astronomers are finding that harnessing the efforts of ordinary people is often the best route to the answers they seek.

“More and more funding organizations are actually promoting this kind of participatory data collection and citizen science,” says Bálint Balázs, managing director of the Social Science Research Group Environmental in Budapest, a non-profit company focusing on socio-economic research for sustainability.

Community science is also a great tool for outreach, and scientists often enjoy interactions with amateur researchers. But it is important to remember that community science is, first and foremost, a research methodology like any other, with its own requirements in terms of skill and effort.

“To do a good project, it takes an investment of time,” says Darlene Cavalier, founder of SciStarter, an online clearinghouse that connects research project leaders with volunteers. “It’s not something where you’re going to throw in a Google form and hope for the best.” Although there are occasions where scientific data is freely and easily available, other projects create significant costs.

Whatever the topic or approach, people skills are crucial: researchers must identify and cultivate a community of volunteers and provide regular feedback or rewards. With the right protocols and checks and balances, the quality of data collected by volunteers often rivals or exceeds that obtained by professionals.

“There’s two-way learning that happens,” says Tina Phillips, assistant director of the Center for Engagement in Science and Nature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “We all know that science is better when there are more voices, more perspectives.”

Co-creating science

Volunteers can come to the rescue when researchers lack the resources to collect enough data, or have much more data than they can hope to analyze on their own.

Frank Grützner, a geneticist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, agrees with the first scenario. He is interested in short-beaked echidnas (Tachyglossus aculeatus) – spiny, egg-laying mammals – but they are not interested in him. Read also : The dream of new proteins, AI unlocks the potential for drugs and vaccines. “If you’re trying to find an echidna, you’re almost guaranteed not to find one,” complains Grützner. Volunteers across Australia not only helped him document more than 12,000 sightings, but also sent him 700 echidna poo samples, leading to the first published report on the creatures’ gut microbiome1.

For astronomer Masayuki Tanaka, the problem is the proliferation of data – in his case, telescopic images that could have captured galaxies in the act of merging. Tanaka, who works at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo, launched the online game Galaxy Cruise in 2019 so that space buffs could help him find those rare conjunctions2. With the help of around 10,000 players, self-proclaimed ‘Captain’ Tanaka says he discovered that mergers are three to five times more common than once thought.

There are three ways to approach a community science project, says Rosy Mondardini, managing director of the Zurich Citizen Science Center, run jointly by the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Projects like those of Grützner or Tanaka are contributory: scientists design the experiment and then ask volunteers to help. Other studies are collaborative, with researchers determining the question at hand and other people helping to spread the word or analyze the data.

Patrick Gavit takes a photo of an insect to post on the iNaturalist app. Credit: Lisa Ebiner Gavit

The last category, which is now growing in popularity, is co-creation, in which members of the community work together with scientists from scratch. The Mondardini center is in favor of joint creation because the scientific literature indicates that it offers the best results for both scientists and volunteers, she says.

Mondardini is working with Sachit Mahajan, a postdoc at ETH, to co-create a project on indoor air quality. The field is so open, says Mahajan, that almost any issue of interest to volunteers yields useful data. He sought out interested parties through Citizen Science Center mailing lists and by word of mouth.

The project’s first meeting, in July, attracted around 20 volunteers, including university students, people with technical backgrounds and families concerned about the air they breathe. Mahajan started with some icebreakers: attendees came together to discuss their concerns, then took a short quiz on local air quality. After he had presented some technical details about air pollution and showed prototypes of air monitors, the discussion turned to what questions should be followed. Those who attended were particularly interested in understanding how the pollution varies in different parts of the house.

To maximize findings, sincere volunteer outreach is essential, says Mahajan. “You have to make sure that when you are talking to the citizens, you are also listening.”

What AAA predicts for July 4th Holiday Travel
See the article :
AAA Travel predicts that 47.9 million people will travel 50 miles or…

People skills

Organizing a large group of volunteers can be daunting, but community science organizations around the world have a wealth of expertise and resources. On the same subject : “Pet tech” and the $ 700 cat litter box. “If you don’t like interacting with people, you want to have someone else on your team who is willing to be their public face and who has that patience,” says Andrew Durso, a wildlife ecologist at the University of the Florida Gulf Coast in Fort Myers. .

Reaching the right volunteers requires understanding their desires. Do they just want to get in with the occasional photo of a butterfly, or are they very passionate about the subject? Is the research connected to a hobby, such as bird identification, or could health or life depend on the project, as in water quality monitoring?

Durso knew exactly where to go when he needed a reptile lover to identify pictures of snakes. When he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, his research group was hoping to guide the treatment of snakebites with an experimentally verified and peer-reviewed system for identification of snakes from photographs3. Durso was already a member of a snake identification Facebook group and recruited contacts there, which helped accumulate more than 100,000 snake IDs in weeks.

If a ready-made community does not exist, there are many places to find volunteers, such as online hubs and project aggregators. For example, the membership of SciStarter includes 140,000 users who are actively involved in projects.

Chris Schaffer, a biomedical engineer at Cornell, and his colleagues needed volunteers to analyze videos of mouse brains for blocked blood vessels, which could be related to Alzheimer’s disease – so he turned the hunt for the blockage into ‘web app, called Stall Catchers. Schaffer reached out to teachers to introduce the app, so they could use it in the classroom. He speaks in community centers and with groups of retired people, for whom the opportunity to help Alzheimer’s research is a big draw. And he ends every scientific talk he gives with a pitch for volunteers. A core group of about 1,000 observers made the most significant contributions, Schaffer says.

Participation in community science often skews toward white, educated, and affluent demographics4, and scientists seek a more diverse pool of participants. For example, when Pauly wanted biodiversity data from under-sampled parts of Los Angeles, he needed volunteers in areas where socioeconomic status was often lower, and involvement in science less prevalent, than is typical for iNaturalist app users.

Pauly and his colleagues contacted local organizations, such as nature centers and libraries, as well as teachers. “Social media has been one of the best ways” to spread the word, Pauly says. He made sure to tag the posts with the specific regions he was interested in, so residents there knew their participation was sought. These people knew about small habitats, like a road embankment or a sliver of turf behind a market, that professional scientists would never think to check.

Jacqueline Goldin, an anthropologist at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, led the recruitment of volunteers for a project to monitor well water levels in Limpopo, the province most -North of the country. The researchers wanted a broad sample of participants in terms of both age and gender. “It’s tricky, and you have to be careful,” she says. Asking the local authorities for names often led to a list of the most powerful people in the villages. The researchers probed deeper for the names of the women and other water collectors, and the first group they recruited helped find others to join the project.

People management does not end with recruitment. Grützner now has 12,000 volunteers for the echidna hunt, and sometimes they call him to chat. He enjoys the interactions, but says, “It uses quite a bit of time.”

Volunteers should take something positive from participating, says Mondardini. This can take the form of learning a skill, interacting with others with similar interests or discussions with professional scientists.

Sharing results is the most crucial element of giving back. “The surefire way to see people leave a project is to not communicate any work back to them,” says Phillips.

Beyond that, many volunteers are quite happy with cheap rewards, like digital badges or occasional meetings. Again, it helps to know one’s audience. The best participants in Durso’s snake identification project were delighted to receive a free natural history book. His colleagues were surprised by the positive response, but Durso says it was the perfect reward for people obsessed with natural history.

Although most projects do not pay volunteers, opinions on remuneration vary. Goldin is against it; she says it sets a precedent that people will expect payment for future projects. Her well water monitors have never asked for payment, but as a gesture of goodwill, the researchers regularly provide food hampers worth around 250 rand (US$14).

There are cases when monetary compensation can make sense, says Lisa Rasmussen, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. For example, if scientists are working with marginalized populations who cannot afford to participate for free, then it may be appropriate to pay them.

LIB CAMPBELL: Please. Don't Ban Books. | Columnists dependenttribune.com
See the article :
When I went back to college in my late 40s, I remember…

Data quality control

Of course, paying attention to the participants should not detract from the attention to the data. This may interest you : Suggestions from the Out West Books team for your next great read. “Citizen science can easily be criticized [in] that the quality of the data is not good, but look at ‘real’ science,” says Balázs, pointing to well-known reproducibility problems.

Scientists can ensure that the data is as accurate as possible by acting before, during and after the collection process5. It starts with “super clear protocols”, says Cavalier. Those instructions should also clearly reflect the stated goals of the study, says Stan Rullman, director of research at the Earthwatch Institute, a nonprofit environmental research funder based in Newton, Massachusetts. If the volunteers can see a clear line connecting the measurements they make with the research objectives, “they will collect better data”, he says.

Matthew McCurry, curator of paleontology at the Australian Museum in Sydney, puts several quality control measures into his online project Date a Fossil. He aims to estimate dates for paleontological sites, starting with McGraths Flat, a Miocene epoch (between 5.3 million and 23 million years ago) site with well-preserved fossils northwest of Sydney, as test case. He has tons of electron microscope images of rock fracture surfaces from the area and needs help finding microfossils that give an independent indication of the site’s age.

When it comes to the actual discovery of fossils, the analysis of one volunteer is not enough: each image must be marked by several volunteers who think that a fossil is present. This statistical approach is one of the most common methods to ensure accuracy, says Mondardini.

An expert paleontologist then checks the potential microfossils. “It greatly reduces the amount of work, to the point of making this project feasible,” says McCurry. So far, the study’s data supports a date during the Miocene, and he hopes to extend this dating technique to other sites.

With proper quality control, hobbyist data can be of a high standard — often even the best data available. Durso, for example, compared snake identifications by volunteers, professional herpetologists and a machine learning algorithm. “Enthusiasts are really good at identifying snakes,” he says. “They are better than the experts.” In fact, the volunteers found more than a dozen misidentified snakes in his first test data set. Both amateur and professional human herpetologists have also conquered computers, although algorithms are improving.

In the best community science projects, everyone gets something out of it. That was the case for Los Angeles resident Patrick Gavit who snapped photos of an invasive African five-lined skink (Trachylepis quinquetaeniata) that caught Pauly6’s eye. Gavit joined Pauly and his museum colleagues in approaching his neighbors for help in finding the animals, and the team eventually captured all 67.

Taking part gave Gavit “a huge amount of satisfaction”, he says. A biochemist by day, Gavit enjoyed moonlighting as a volunteer skink scientist. “I consider myself an amateur naturalist. Being involved in a science project related to nature is even more exciting.”

See the article :
Philanthropic funding is a crucial resource for many arts organizations. 40 percent…

Is Earth and space science easy?

Earth and space sciences are among the most easily studied sciences by students.

Is High School Earth Science hard? Earth Science or Physical Science is less math intensive and rigorous than Physics. Therefore, students who are less confident in science or who find mathematics difficult can choose Earth Science or Physics.

Is Earth Science hard?

Earth Science is a challenging scientific field, but it is also an exciting field, and most classes include field trips and hands-on experiences. Careers in Earth Science include jobs in industry, ranging from petroleum engineers working for giant oil companies to engineering geologists who are their own bosses.

What is a Earth and space science?

Earth and space sciences (ESS) investigate processes that operate on Earth and also address their place in the solar system and galaxy. Thus the ESS involve phenomena that vary in scale from the unimaginably large to the invisibly small.

What grade level is Earth and space science?

Degree Level Certificate Scope A person holding a valid PA Earth and Space Science certificate is qualified to teach all introductory and/or advanced earth and space science courses , in Grades 7 to 12.

Is AGU 2021 Virtual?

#AGU21 is offering attendees in-person and online experiences to foster networking and professional growth, provide exposure to emerging ideas from scientific thought leaders, and support your research.

How long are AGU abstracts? The abstract title is limited to 300 characters and the abstract text is limited to 2,000 characters. The limit excludes spaces but includes punctuation.

Where will Agu 2021 be held?

The AGU Fall Meeting 2021 will be held in person in New Orleans, Louisiana as well as online anywhere from December 13 to 17.

What does AGU stand for?

American Geophysical Union Headquarters in 2022
AbbreviationAGU
Formation1919
TypeScientific society
Tax ID no.52-0955532

What is science news by AGU?

Eos is the science news magazine published by AGU.

What is the AGU publication? The AGU book program aims to publish up to 20 books per year across the breadth of Earth and space science topics by leading researchers from around the world.

What is the purpose of AGU?

To support and inspire a global community of individuals and organizations interested in advancing discovery in the Earth and space sciences and its benefit to humanity and the environment.

What is AGU science?

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), which was established in 1919 by the National Research Council and for more than 50 years operated as an unincorporated affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences, is now a chartered nonprofit corporation under the laws of the District of Columbia.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *