Citizen help key in more research areas

POUGHKEEPSIE -- Environmental scientist Chris Bowser pulled a tiny shrimp-like creature from the muck in an eel trap as teenagers in chest waders surrounded him in the rushing Fall Kill, where they were collecting transparent baby eels.

"This is called a scud, or amphipod," Bowser said, launching into a riff on the food chain and pollution. "Are you going to eat it?" a girl interrupted. "What? No!" Bowser snapped, then reconsidered and popped it in his mouth. "Tastes like shrimp seasoned with mud."

Besides being a researcher in the state's Hudson River Estuary Program, Bowser leads citizen projects that collect reams of data for scientists and resource management agencies while engaging volunteers in hands-on science and teaching them something about the world around them. His Steve Irwin-style exuberance and enthusiasm for his subject make Bowser an ideal leader in the expanding world of citizen science.

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 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 as 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 portal with more than 400 projects in its database today mirrors the expansion of citizen science in the United States, Cavalier said.

"My goal is to get as many people as possible involved in citizen science projects," said Cavalier. The more people learn about science and build a connection to research, the better they'll participate in policy decisions related to science and the environment, she said.

For researchers, volunteers provide free labor and are able to complete a great deal of work in a short time if there are a lot of them. Galaxy Zoo was launched in 2007 to enlist volunteers to classify photographs of a million galaxies. More than 250,000 people have participated so far, providing information used in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles.

"Professional science communities were a little wary of involving the public in the past because of trust issues and concerns about bad data," Cavalier said. Better design of projects and new methods of weeding out bad data have overcome much of that concern, she said.