 He weathered blizzards to get here, so without further delay, I'll introduce your client. And this is a requirement, I'm told, even though I can be heard without it. Got to use it, right? Oh, well, okay, I feel like I'm just about to start a set with the Rolling Stones here, so... We expect some dancing, Rick. We expect some dancing. Well, I just discovered that my slides aren't compatible with this system. I'm not going to be able to show you any pictures, so I might as well just do a set for you, right? I usually start with a song I learned from Jerry Jeff Walker. So, I'm Jim C. Songman. Yes, sir, do you like to hear the song? I'll pick it over you now and play it all night long. So, shall I keep that going? We're talking about citizen science. Can anybody do the harmony for me? Alright, we're here to talk about the power and potential of citizen science. I'm going to guess you have all heard the term citizen science by now. I'm going to start by showing you a map. Maybe you've seen this recently because it was actually in the New York Times last week, much to my surprise. This is a map of North and Central and South America. Each one of those blue dots represents the center of a population of a species of theotropical migratory birds. So, in other words, I don't know which ones are which. I'm not really a very good ontologist, I'm really a performer. But this maybe is, for example, a warbler, or maybe this is a kind of flycatcher. But each one of those is a species, alright? And that's showing a center of location on January 3rd on an average January 3rd. And now this is showing you how those species migrate over the course of the year. And you can see that as they go north, most of them are going up to the Central part, Central America, and up into North America, and then reading sometimes as far up as the Arctic. You're going to turn around, it's going to get cold and there's not going to be any more food, and they're going to head south. But look, they're not even all going the same way. They're following the prevailing winds in some cases. Well, until this map was drawn, we had no idea what the migratory power is and all of these hundreds of species of migratory birds were. And this map has been drawn only because of a citizen science project called EBRU, which is global now. We started with, I think, the National Science Foundation about 15 years ago. And we now get over 5 million checklists per month from birders around the world that allows us to make maps in bird distribution. And we do a lot of other things, which I would agree we talked about earlier. So, that's citizen science. EBRU, any questions? Actually, citizen science is a lot. And when you go out into the world, people say, oh, citizen science, I've heard about that, bird watchers collecting data. Oh, no, it's not real science. It's kids in classrooms making up data. Oh, and to people mapping the surface of the moon. It's all these things. Well, it actually is all these things. I have become quite content to use the definition that's now in the Oxford English Dictionary. Scientific work undertaken by members of the public, typically in collaboration with scientists. It's nice. It's simple. It encompasses most kinds of citizen science. And it's in the Oxford English Dictionary. Isn't that pretty cool? We started using this term in 1995, really, and now it's in the dictionary. So, find your entire... Well, what I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk to you in the broadest sense about citizen science. And I'm going to give you three big overarching ideas. The first is that citizen science is big, interdisciplinary, and highly, highly productive. The second is that it has the potential to transform science and society. And the third, and maybe most important, is that for it to be productive and for it to have this potential, it must be built through a deliberate, intentional design in a very, very careful way. So, I'm going to start out with this big, interdisciplinary, productive idea. I'm going to talk to you about the four buckets of citizen science. Just kind of try to have some terminology to get your heads around. Some of them are going to be thought of in that idea. Now, there are a lot of typologies of citizen science out in the world now. They're all good, and they all come up with particular reasons. This isn't even really a typology. This is just a super wave classifier categorizing types of projects. And we're very briefly describing each one starting with data collection. Well, I already showed you Ebert. But Ebert is obviously not the only data collection citizen science program out there. There's hundreds and hundreds of other ones. One of my favorites is an honorary monitor. I just run out of the University of Minnesota by a professor named Karen Oberhauser. And for this project, there are thousands of people, mostly in the eastern and middle part of the country, that are monitoring milkweed to try and find out about the changes in distribution to the numbers of monarchy to get a handle on the population. And to help understand that practices that are causing milkweed to decline are causing monarys to decline. The data collection citizen science programs are not just about animals. There's also a lot of them about plants, too. Here's one called Nature's Notebook, which is a phenology program run by the U.S. National Phenology Network, which is part of the U.S. Geologic Survey, in which thousands of people are gathering data about phenology, which is the timing of events in nature. When are blesses in the week? When are leaves changing color? When are birds nesting? These are data important to understand a lot of environmental changes, including, of course, climate change. But data collection citizen science is not just about organisms. It can also be about inanimate things, like precipitation. So the Community Collaborative Rain Handling Stone Network, which started out as the Colorado Collaborative Rain Handling Stone Network, is one of the largest projects in the world right now when people are gathering precipitation data that rain gauges in their houses and their yards. And that information is being used to do early on predictions of storms and floods. Now, one of the things that ticks me off, there aren't too many of them, but people as much today can push a couple of buttons. One of the things that ticks me off is this thing that I see in the newspaper all the time about this new thing called citizen science, where the public is actually gathering usable data that isn't as awesome as they thought on the Internet. But you know what? These guys didn't use the Internet. And I would tell you that Aristotle was the father of citizen science. I don't remember. I was a social scientist or historian. I forget when he was born and when he died. But I really think that the idea of anybody with a brain being able to observe the world around them and draw conclusions goes back to Aristotle. Maybe even beyond money. Five points for anybody who can mentally say what paper it is. Very good, very good. This is an insight into the school of afternoons. But as the years went by and science became professionalized, the idea that you couldn't participate in science unless you had a degree became more and more prevalent until it got to the point where, in some cases, kids are actually scared of science because they didn't have to have a white cloud in their lab to be a scientist. Everyone's knew a funny story. This is the long time to tell it. Just because of a face you might be starting to fall asleep, I'm going to tell it right now anyway. So we were doing an evaluation of one of our classroom projects. You know, pre-posts, you ask people a bunch of questions before they do it, you ask them questions again after they're doing it. One of the questions that we asked these kids was, would you want to be a scientist when you grow up? And of course, after participating in citizen science, they're all supposed to say yes, even if they said no. So this one young girl, fifth grade, went up and down, which she wrote as a reason why because science has always done it before they find the answers to it. She didn't learn something though, did she? But the idea that they all together and collect data even a hundred years ago was starting to come together. Lighthouse surveys put together by the American anthropologists in 1880 where lighthouse keepers were urged to keep track of the birds that were crashing into their lighthouse because they were attracted by the lights. 1890, the National Weather Service started a cooperative observer program, which is still going on today. In some cases, the rain, the weather stations are in the same families and ranches and farms that they were in 1890, same families. In 1900, the National Wildlife Society started the Christmas Bird Channel, which was again a very famous early start to the idea of thousands of people banding together to collect information about an organism the next century about its history. But the internet did enable a different kind of citizen science. One, the internet became fully functional and we started gathering images from Hubble Space Telescope and other different ways of collecting information through photography and other kinds of environmental sensors. The kind of citizen science that I call data processing was enabled. And this started with galaxy and zoom, which probably most of you have heard of. But the idea is that if you're an astronomer, which I am not, I think the stars are cool if I can point out a big difference. But if you're an astronomer, you want to understand the classification of galaxies and the Hubble Space Telescope sends back millions of these issues, these images, they would be categorized and it would take a graduate student who has been very late to do it. So the folks at this program called Zooniverse said, well, let's see if we can get the public to help us categorize these images coming back from the Hubble Space Telescope. It was so successful that in a few weeks they had done what it would have taken scientists years, decades to do. And that gave birth to the Zooniverse platform and a whole lot of other data processing projects. So the snapshots there and getting old weather, all these different programs where people are trying to make sense out of all of these images and they quote and publish. And another way that volunteers can get involved in doing data processing that I really think is cool is by helping to annotate the millions, probably billions of specimens that are in museums all around the world that don't have the correct information digitized that have old labels that are stuck on them and somebody has to go in and get all that information associated with the specimen and not the computer so it could be used by scientists around the world. And this is being done really, really successfully. But there's another kind of citizen science in my bucket here called community science. And this is also not new. The idea of community science is people coming together to try to start a problem usually of more local significance or interest. In a lot of times, community science projects are really born from the community. It's people who suddenly realize that they're sick. They're being caused to have something wrong with their air or their water. And they say, what can we do about this? And they might reach out to scientists to try to help them gather data that they can use for regulatory reasons. Water quality monitoring goes back decades and decades and it's been very successfully employed in terms of gathering data to problem. For example, designated trout streams as state or national trout streams. And more recently, a lot of different watersheds have gotten together. And we've gotten people to come together and study a lot of different organisms on one part of the watershed to try to understand more about that area. So the idea here is that it's all about programming on a local project where our citizens are reaching out and saying to the community, please help us gather data that we'll have integrity that we can take and get some changes made. I have a couple of examples of some algorithms and those just in a little bit. And then another kind of project would be a curriculum project. Now a curriculum project could actually be a data collection project. It could actually be a data processing project or a community science project. But I set it aside because curriculum projects are opportunities for a leader to engage very intensively with a group, whether it's in school or out of school. Whether it's a classroom with six graders or whether it's a Boy Scout group or a 4-H group. The opportunity to take one of these citizen science projects and actually build less than a few years around it in a very organized way, even adhering to national standards whatever they may be. So one example is GERDSTOOP, which was founded by the National Science Foundation for us to build a curriculum originally over a feeder watch and then over an eaver. Another good example is Driven Discover from the University of Minnesota which is a curriculum built on that monitoring program. And some curricula are not built on parent programs by eavers or the monitoring programs. Sometimes it's just a really good curriculum put together by educators working in conjunction with teachers or other informal leaders and really coming up with something that works to try to have the kids learn some particular cognitive objectives. So those are four different buckets of thinking about citizen science just so that we have the field in front of it so we understand what we're talking about when we move on to talk about the potential to transform science in society. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about this transformation in terms of pre-buckets, increasing scientific knowledge informing science and conservation policy and for those of you at lunch see the slash? And achieving educational outcomes. Citizen science projects can do all of these things and one citizen science project if designed correctly or appropriately can do all three of them. Not all citizen science projects have to do all three of these things in order to be successful. If a citizen science project sets out to increase scientific knowledge and it does so, it's successful. Whether or not it teaches anybody everything. If a citizen science project starts out to teach people something and it does so it's successful even if it really increases scientific knowledge as long as it has scientific integrity as long as there's real science. Not all projects are designed to inform science and conservation so there's no rights or wrongs here. So back to Monarchs again. We were talking over lunch about early experiences that at least in my case really galvanized my interest in the environment. One of those was a family camping trip in Slowpoke which I think is in West Virginia. When we were sitting and having lunch at the picnic table all of a sudden we got into the middle of a migration of butterflies. Man, I didn't know about butterflies. I was just going to say and I've loved butterflies and I've loved Monarchs ever since. There are a lot of Monarch projects. Not just Monarch but Monarch project. And results from these projects have allowed scientists to discover where the wintery grounds are and to understand population and migration dynamics and to understand how butterflies interact with crops and how very important pollinations there is to the point where this new book published last year by Cornell Press could not have been published without Citizen Science paper. It might have but it would not have been as rich and robust as it did because of so much of the information from people participating in Citizen Science. Last year some folks got together to begin to do one of the first analyses kind of field wide analyses with the impact of data collection for the Citizen Science project. This is actually the history of this is really pretty cool because the group of people that put this project together was a graduate student class run by a professor and assistant dean of the environment, Julia Perich at the University of Washington. And she does a graduate class every year and she said okay, class let's find out what the impact is of data collection Citizen Science project. There have been some more in the past since then. This is the first one now. And these students looked at about 400 different projects which they gathered from different databases in the Citizen Science project. And in these 400 or so projects they found there were over a million volunteers and that they contributed two and a half billion dollars if you would actually have taken the data they collected. And that 12% of these projects were contributing to peer review publications. Now that may not sound like a lot except you have to remember that not all Citizen Science projects are peer review publications. And sometimes when they're in their earlier stages there aren't enough data to do so. So the idea that there were already over 10% of these projects contributing was pretty amazing. And actually the number of peer review publications based on Citizen Science data that are coming out are astronomical. If you don't know about Google Scholar Alerts you should know about Google Scholar Alerts. So you can go in and you can set a color and search on it if you want. I have said in my case the search Google Alerts it searches Cornell University in science education but it searches Citizen Science to get that location. And so every couple of days I get a list of all the papers that have come out on Citizen Science over the last couple of days. You should try this. It's unbelievable and it's really comprehensive. It finds you b-scenes. We recently published a white paper on behalf of the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council. It's on their website. It's a Google Scholar one day to find that. It's really, really comprehensive. And you can really see just how fast these publications are rising. And it's not just in backyard magazines. It's in top journals. Very top journals. Including Bioscience which I'll call out especially because Bioscience has long been very friendly to Citizen Science. The editor Tim Beardsley is very interested in quality papers about Citizen Science. I am the Citizen Science subject editor for Fort Vile Science. And just today we accepted the most recent article on Citizen Science which will be out in the May issue which shows how E-Bird has transformed something called G-Vill. And E-Bird data are actually beginning to fill in data gaps in countries all over the world that up until now have not had enough data. So for the May issue of Bioscience we're going to read this paper. It's fairly technical and really fascinating. So if you have ideas for papers, you can talk to me about them. Also, biological conservation. The editor there he was Abe Miller-Rushing's major professor at the Boston School of University and he and Abe did the work at Walden Pond where they were able to show climate change by comparing results from now to a hundred years ago. Help me out. Anyway, again very very friendly to Citizen Science. What about this idea of these data informing science and conservation policy? So I was talking before about how these local projects of water quality projects had the opportunity to do this. But the big data collection projects were back in E-Bird for a minute. What we're looking at here is a map of California that's a state for the west of here. In New York I sometimes do have to explain what California is. And what you're looking at here is a map from E-Bird data showing you where some of the E-Bird, well first of all we're going to show you where wreckage complexes are where there's protected land. And what we can do is we can overlay maps from E-Bird on this and we can figure out what the gap is. We can figure out where in California it's absolutely essential that the land be flooded at certain times of the year for migratory water that we didn't fail. And then working with the nature conservancy what we've done is a reverse auction with the farmers there in which we actually pay them instead of growing rice. And the farmers really don't care where the money's coming from. And the birds now have a place to land and refuel. And as soon as the birds are gone they drain and the rice is worth a lot. As a matter of fact it worked out so well that we got into the New York Times. But back at the local level citizen science also can really have a big impact on local policy. So the project was an incident that just happened a couple of years ago in the one in New York which is near Buffalo. And the residents really did feel sick they thought there was something wrong with our air. So they went to a group called the Vector Group which is a group that works around the country supplying residents with low cost sensors for air water monitoring. They were pollution monitors. They collected the data. They had it analyzed by the four people gate scientists. So they sent the information to the EPA. The EPA would get it and say, whoa, really? And they said, the EPA scientists read the studies, they corroborated what the citizens have found and it resulted in changes. They didn't want to in terms of smoke stacks and locations all because these folks took it into their own hands because they had some of the department that could go in the pocket again and get scientific help. If you're more interested in the correlation between citizen science and conservation I really urge you to take a look at this issue of a journal called Issues in Ecology Investing in citizen science with natural resource management environmental protection. All you have to do is Google citizen science issues in ecology right out of the way. This is a project that a whole team of people put together targeting specifically for agency heads to help them understand the importance and the significance of citizen science in conservation. It's a real easy read and I think important. Okay, but then what about this achieving educational outcomes? So theoretically we are here at a meeting of the Informal Science Education Network and theoretically we are all more interested in the educational outcomes than any of the other, right? That's my justification. I have a lot more slides about education than I could about the other one. Okay, so a few things that I want to say here we know that citizen science experiences are education. We know that in a large number of ways we have a lot of ways of getting that information. One is that people just simply tell us in the old days they go to sweaters and now they send us emails or they get on listsuiters and they say things like this I learned a lot about behavior taking part in the project increased my thirst for knowledge it was fun and educational. Now those are anecdotes and not really data. Some people will say the plural of anecdotes is not data and I say this is just incidental information coming in from the participants when you get a lot of it you begin to get the idea people are really having their lives changed by participating in these projects and that is how really at the level of morphology we really galvanized this whole science movement by going to the National Science Foundation in about 1990 to have a lot of information that people's lives are being changed we think that if we can really build intentionally designed projects and specifically measurable educational outcomes then you should give us $897,000 to do this and thankfully Barbara Butler was the program officer at the time and saw that as the idea because if sometimes people call me I don't deserve she's kind of like the mother of the science because she was right there and I said it's not like good reviews but Barbara really really saw in the early days of the potential and helped us to receive $897,000 and that was what really washed this whole series of projects that we got at the level of morphology to really achieve educational outcomes because this is the important science education part of NSF and so this really started us off on a long journey of trying to understand what do we mean by education how do we design projects to achieve these outcomes and what are the outcomes that we're actually trying to achieve in the earliest days people would put out a project let's say an SBOX project, not our SBOX project but a SBOX project and they would say okay we think that kids are going to learn from participating in this thing and then at the end of the project they would give them a test and the test would ask them about recycling and they would give the answers wrong and their conclusion would be they didn't learn anything from this project I am not kidding I'm serious and so the whole idea of trying to bring some sense to the field and really trying to say look you've got to design the project for a specific set of outcomes and the evaluation tools to measure what we're trying to accomplish it's really been a long, hard all starting to acumen from the 90s now in 2009 or so 2008 there were a fair number of citizen science projects that had been developed most student MSF new evaluations started and the Center for the Advancement of Equal Science Education asked me to get a group of people together to try to find out if there are people learning anything that's a huge question but we had something to start with because writer in 2007 or 2008 Alan Friedman who had been the director of the New York College of Science had come out with something which are very soon known as the NSF framework for evaluation of the Friedman indicators and here they are engagement, knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors we're still talking about giant buckets but at least we've got something to start with so what we did was we put together a lubricant matrix all of what we will but we started to break those topics down into things that you could consider as potential outcomes for citizen science can measure and the matrix can be found in our report which you can get to but just be able to change the citizen science on the end of the whole thing or you can buy our book and you can use it so we began to understand that by applying this lubricant retroactively to these subject evaluations we were beginning to find instances of knowledge gain by a mental attitude change and such and I'm going to come back to that in a few minutes we're not even about a quarter of an understanding but that was very important which makes perfect sense anybody who thinks about education was that different kinds of projects different kinds of outcomes depending on the degree to which the participants were involved in the whole process of science so this is a true typology of citizen science published in 2009 in that case report which is really caught on so the idea is that in a contributory project whatever all the folks are doing is collecting and analyzing samples and the neighborhood is collected and they're learning that they're learning certain things whereas in what we call the collaborative project where the participants are involved in a greater spectrum of activity there are a different set of things that they're learning and if they're in a co-creative project which is sometimes called community science maybe even helping to get a number set of skills and outcomes so for example is anybody here to take back our third count all about your brother I could say is anybody not you can hold up your hands and embarrass yourself so the great back up third count starts this tomorrow the great back up third count is funded by the national science foundation surprise surprise and here's a funny story that I'll tell you about the great back up third count I'm going to tell you anyway so we started the great back up third count not actually get birth data but actually to see if the internet could work to collect birth data that's really the reason that we started that and the idea was okay the internet really ought to work because it can all the stuff that we can do so I'm here watching the scan of the forms people would fill in their form with the number two pencil that would send it to us as it was faster than anything that had ever happened before it's still pretty slow but with the internet you get the answers back just like that and so that's why we started the great back up third count and it's become so popular we can't turn it off so it continues to this day now that's not to say it's not important it is very very important the data that come from the great back up third count I don't usually get used to that sort of thing but because we've got eBird and if you're going to answer a question we're just going to go straight to the eBird but the great back up third count is an amazing education that's going to forget about families and kids involved in citizen science it's the biggest eBird that we have for eBird every now and then it's like a new job, right? for a weekend it's a lot of fun but now if you participate in the great back up third count there's some things that we know that you will learn because we've done pre and post testing surveys we've learned to identify more species we'll understand eBird population diversity and we'll see interesting behaviors use data analysis to what people do this but if you're involved in this a law of hard of sustainability study which was run by a colleague of mine named Hyde Ballard who's now a professor at the University of California in Davis where she involved 25 workers in trying to figure out how to sustainably harvest serol which is an undergrowth or meadow specific to our class these folks really really depended on the serol for their life and they had to learn how to not over harvest it and they worked with Eric to understand this and how to harvest it and look what they learned they learned to collect field data they learned how science is conducted they were involved in setting up the experiment they actually improved the relationships that they had as harvesters with forest management and forest service really really cool another project another very famous one from Tillerie, North Carolina Community Health Effects and Industrial Hog operation which was a lot like what happened in Hanowanda with the air pollution project where they went out into the community I just don't have time to describe the whole thing they went out into the community and they learned how to take data on their own health on different days and this also culminated in changing the regulations about where our plants could be located and here these folks had increased awareness of how human health and air quality issues interact they were involved in policy change they realized that their communities were becoming very very powerful is this better learning than GVBC it's this different it's a different project, it's a different audience it's a different health plan are there ways of doing things with EVER so that we can begin to develop and use the EVER platform for community science so that both kinds of learning can happen yes there are and that's one of the future of civil science is beginning to learn how to plan these models together this is the informal science education here I'm not going to talk very much about formal learning right now other than to say it is easier to evaluate when you have captive kids in the classroom and teachers who are willing to participate but I fear that I'm not going to finish away as well on that right now before I move on to the final phase of this talk I do want to mention a project that is funded by the National Science Foundation and one of the things that we realized when we put together that report for the case for the informal science education is that there was a real dirt of quality evaluation tools for citizen science in fact there's a real dirt of that for the whole informal science education and so we used that case report as the basis for a grant proposal to say give us $200 and what we will do is we will put together validating evaluation instruments that anybody can use to evaluate educational outcomes for citizen science and we wanted to come up with this online toolkit and I'm not going to go all the way through this toolkit right now but what I think is all online but what I will tell you is that this important wheel amounts to going back to the freedom framework and redoing the constructs but this time starting in the field so we went on to the web and we looked at all the goals and objectives for every student science project on our website we surveyed the fields we used our own experience at the lab for technology and we identified these six constructs as those that project leaders and participants are most interested in achieving or gaining through citizen science and then we developed evaluation tools to measure the testing and the testing and the testing and the testing and at this point most standardized scales are met and you can get them for free download them and I'll show you another slide at the end of the talk they'll show you where you can go to get them but I think something that's really important about this is not just that we have these evaluation tools that you can measure the outcomes but that we can find the potential possible outcomes so now when somebody writes a proposal to NSF and they say well we're going to measure environmental behavior and they don't break it down but they say specifically what they need they're not going to get pumped because they couldn't call and they couldn't look at these constructs which we built across the entire field that's both that's both the tip and so we just came up with a paper just a couple of months ago in the journal public understanding of science and I would urge you to read this one again just google public understanding of science citizen science and come right to this I would urge you to read this one because I believe it is the most comprehensive review so far published of all of the known learning and outcomes through citizens I mean there's probably been a few more it's pretty easy to read okay so finally on to the intentional design now what time this is I need to sing again a little bit more time intentional design you can't just throw out a project and expect it to come up with good data or you can form a conservation policy or to have measurable objectives you have to know what you're building really very well so that brings us to why I'm actually up here why am I standing in front of it well it's because I've been doing this for 30 some odd years and been standing on the shoulders of this guy here Arthur Allen who's the founder of the lab for one pathology although I never met him died 2 years before I got to the lab absolutely one of my heroes so he was the first professor in the form of pathology in the world he was at Cornell University he was in the entomology department because there wasn't a one pathology department and after he finished his degree on memory blackbirds they said he hired him as a professor of one pathology in the entomology department and he went to the entomology chair one day and said this is really weird I study birds and we study bugs and I said call yourself a lab of one pathology so he hung a sign on his door knob and said a lab of one pathology and that is how the lab started 100 years ago this year we just celebrated our September and Arthur Allen I could do I have a whole lecture on the history of the lab but I don't have one to give you Allen went on to revolutionize and galvanize the field of one pathology he started the field of one pathology he started the business of the document which in those days was justice cutting edge as a lot of the new internet technology is now he began birds long recording he trained graduate students that went on to popular most of the important foreign policy programs around the country now in California partner at LSU but he always connected with the public that is Arthur Allen going out one afternoon with the campus bird club this was his passion he said our support we have to stay in touch with the public we're an interdependent and that led in 1965 which is starting the nest record card which was one of the first organized business science projects and the first one that allowed one pathology I knew about that project when I was a kid and as I told you and as I told you all over lunch my parents took my whole family out they took us out of school so they did not let school and here as us here we are now for one time and so this I need the rest of the birds and this early experience of my father getting me to collect my own data my knowledge of this citizen science is what led me to allow one ecology as a student in 1972 now I never knew that I would still be there not many years nor did the lab look like this in 1972 that's our current building now which is 12 years old but I'm not going to tell you my old boring history either but I was fortunate to be at the lab in 1983 I came back to the lab full time and I was fortunate to be there to start all the business and science projects along the way I was promoted to director of education which is when I wrote the first time self proposal and then later on to the director of citizen science and now to the director of all the engagement and the science and thoughts but I got to design all these projects which is to tell you I know what I'm talking about when it comes to designing citizen science projects because I've designed more of them than anybody else in the world I'm pretty sure it was in 2001 I was really really really excited about citizen science and where we got into but we still didn't have the killer project I mean the nest watch project we had classroom theater watch and one day I went to do a a site visit in Orlando it was March it was a nice time to be in Orlando and I was out with the kids and they were watching the theater and I said we need a program where anybody can report anywhere anywhere on any place so I went back to the lab and there's all these burgers with sheet boxes full of data we've got to give them a place to put this information that's where the idea for eBird came up in around 2000 I think we launched it in 2002 and so at this point eBird has can you read that in the back of the room? it's just big as it's really really a success over a hundred peer-reviewed publications and it's used every other year to stay in the birds room but the reason it's successful is because we follow the components of successful projects in time and we didn't have this chart set out in front of us we actually kind of developed this as we went along if you want this, I can also tell you where to find this just go to the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council website I'm just going to really quickly tell you a little bit about why eBird is successful in how we follow the steps of program design and then I'll be quiet and if there's anybody still awake you can ask questions so let's say you saw a Castro in downtown Albuquerque you would go in and you'd say, I'm an Albuquerque you're working at your smart home you just turn on the eBird and you could click in and say, I want to submit a submitted observation and it would come up with this and it would say, what kind of observation are you submitting? are traveling, is it stationary, is it historical? which is how people actually go or is it incidental? did you just happen to see something? yeah, I happened to see Castro so then I would put in just one eBird and I would put in what time it was and it would give me this list is the list tailored to Albuquerque on February 11th 2015 which has been curated by our original letter I don't know if we wanted to but there are hundreds of region letterers all around the country who are monitoring these lists and these filters so they can share their accurate enough today so it only has, it doesn't have an eastern Phoebe object because you're not going to see an eastern Phoebe now and it doesn't have a reason you wouldn't see it go away and when you put in your American Castro if you want to you can click on a button and it will have you put in its picture put it in its sound and send all that information to us as well that's a terrible feature and then in this case there's this one other really important button now if you're just doing incidental sighting you even know you're not recording all the words you saw because it knows you're just going to put a bird in but if you said that you're doing a traveling account it asks you this question are you recording all the words you saw and that's a really critically important question this is a teacher workshop I'd make you figure out why but the answer is if you say yes then we know that there's a bird on there's a bird you didn't check off you didn't see it so we also know it was absent I mean at least I'm detecting a bird and so by having we're reaching out to editors and the filters we avoid problems like that and we reach out to editors and change the filters at any point so they suddenly Eastern VDs move in to Albuquerque, New Bedford and if you saw one and you were sure of it and you were recording it you were asking for a picture of cooperation so you could really so when people say what about quality control I say to them what about your quality control as one scientist or one of the graduates who compared to what we have here with hundreds of regional editors filtering this data and thousands and thousands of very expert editors now why do people do it some of them do it because they actually do science some of them do it because they want a free way to keep their life list backed up on our servers and triplicate so that you can have your office list, your yard list your vacation list you can compare them here charts and maps and graphs of your data, of your neighbor's data answer all kinds of questions track the spread of a bird increases its range more these are all possible we have all of these tools that we made available on the bird some other people do it because they're part of a project that has a path that has a portal on the bird like Louisiana bird evidence we used to hear platforms build this for the state of Louisiana or if you're in Mexico you go to this website here in Spanish so people are comfortable going to the portal that is speaking to them when I was in Australia last summer I was really fortunate to be able to go there to the Australian citizens those associated with inaugural meeting and I had an extra day in Canada and I wanted to see the most birds that I could find and so I used the bird to tell me where to go and it sent me to the Black Mountain Nature Reserve which was watching distance and I had enough to get bird checkers where I even got there and I was able to find pretty much all the birds that were on this list and you can do that anywhere in the world but we now have a map all for you and this is really good for us because people never make a location here but we need to have and all of the data are available for free to anybody who requests them as long as they put in the data so they can track that so that we can go back and find out later how they're using the data and what became of it it's a matter of how people were using the data that was found out that hundreds of them were using ebird for conservation purposes in local areas and that article about that is going to be the lead article of the special issue about conservation it's going to be coming out really soon so anybody who wants to you don't have to be a line of pathology scientist anybody who wants to carry down the data and write a paper here's somebody who did this paper about citizen science or ebird fragility and taxes climate change on birds that's out of nowhere that would be cheaper to do the method right okay I don't see anything going on so I don't have to see yet and I'll just finish up with a few last slides here about going forward with the field there are hundreds of projects there are thousands of projects some of them are really good and as we're going to go forward with this field and as we're going to convince policy makers and scientists members and people in the government that citizen science is critical and working important we need as the field to maintain the very, very high standards of credibility and so there's a few things that we're doing to build a field of citizen science one, we started the citizen science association we now have over 4,000 members I think it's publicless for the whole continent at this point it's free to join at this point and we have a really wonderful newsletter that goes out about every month and we are going to engage very, very deeply in the profession of development while traveling around putting on workshops for professionals who want to do citizen science projects and webinars and we have a website www.citizens.org it used to be known by the lab but we signed an MOU with the citizen science association so it's now officially the website of the association we already live with that transition right now we started a journal about citizen science, theory and practice the first issue will have 10 articles it will be out I think in March five of the articles are in the layout right now there are five in various other states but these are articles not about the scientific outcomes of citizen science because those articles belong in the college of science in all the other questions of science but this is articles like how to do it what are its impacts how to build a field for example one article is about using embedded assessment as a hand analysis tool I happen to be the editor of the journal so there's nothing submitting about that we're going to have conferences every other year our first one was last year an association which was AS in Baxano Bay, California but the next one is going to be the museum of science in Raleigh next February plans are well underway with that there are two other citizen science associations the Australian citizen science association which had its inaugural meeting last July which I got to go to the European citizen science association which I got to go to in May which year we got to go to and we have board members in common we have an MO we're all working together we've been publishing materials like we have a data management guide that was put together under the auspices of data one which is by professor at UMNM we have a primer for data policies that was also put together through the ages of day one now this is really really important in order to really really have an impact on the citizen science we need to make sure that citizen science involves all audiences not just audiences that at this point are typically involved in such things as collecting data either and this does not mean that we're saying that there are a lot of audiences that are underserved and need to be caught something what we're saying is that there are a lot of audiences that have something to offer us as scientists and educators they have important ways of thinking and looking at the world indigenous cultures all kinds of minority cultures one really really quick we'll sort it here which I told you much I'll make it really really short I was recently asked by my colleague general to help a south Atlantic fisheries management council put together a citizen science program for the southern Atlantic oceans this is really important because the SAF sets all the regulations for hardest sanctuary no fishing is always responding that way and the key audience that we're working with here are the fishermen and so the first day of this conference we spent entirely saying it's the fishermen it's your ocean, you're the ones out there fishing you know the fish are, you know what the problems are tell us what we need to spike now there's oceans going to hell and we're going to tell the fishermen what the catch is and how we're going to go the other way around because they aren't the ones who are the models this is what absolutely has to happen for citizen science to go forward you even know what the issues of the concerns are for all populations and that's what this guy says I told you before about the provides project if you go to citizen science.org you can download all those guides they just told you about our evaluation guide and also all of the advisors and then the last thing that I would say in the case you didn't know is that citizen science at this point has caught the attention of President Obama and his advisor and all of the leading agencies and resource management it was a big day last September after the White House a whole lot of things happened that day I can't even explain or describe all of them but one of them was the John Holger mission demo saying that all of the federal agencies needed to appoint a citizen science coordinator within 90 days which I guess is probably about about now and most of them have and I know who brought them up and are really working together with the association which is really very exciting so recently when I wanted to talk to the chief scientist with NOAA and took a phone call and he was like he had already read our stuff he knew exactly what we wanted to know just his ratings another thing that happened was that the director of NSF that they talked about how NSF was going to begin putting resources specifically in the citizen science not just you can ask for money for citizen science but we're targeting the citizen science and if you look at the press release that went out with the NSF it was such a great class just about two days ago the last bullet on there is about funding specifically for citizen science it doesn't establish anything like a director or anything like that where it does say supplements, evers, rapids early exclamation we're ready for this project this is really really big but the other thing we need to worry about is that there's better involvement and it's really great this slide here because these are my kids that's all