Nice shout-out from the Associated Press this weekend:
Once restricted mainly to counting birds – most famously, in Audubon’s 111-year-old Christmas Bird Count – citizen science has expanded rapidly in recent years, both in number and variety of projects. Some projects count things – fireflies, ladybugs, frogs, herring. Others record data on water quality, weather, flower budding and other phenomena. Still others already have the data but need a lot of people to sort through it.
Darlene Cavalier, whose ScienceforCitizens website brings together volunteers and research projects, said she started the site when she was a graduate student writing a thesis on promoting citizen science. The site’s growth from a blog listing about 40 projects in 2006 to a busy portal with more than 400 projects in its database today mirrors the expansion of citizen science in the US, Cavalier said.
“My goal is to get as many people as possible involved in citizen science projects,” said Cavalier.
Read the full story.