Last week I attended the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union where 22,000 scientists gathered to talk about hydrology, geology, oceanography, climate change, planetary science, science education, and a boatload more. Pamela Gay and I were helping the very fabulous Connie Walker of Globe at Night to run the sessions on citizen science. I was amazed at the wide variety and scope of citizen science project available out there, and I’d like to share a few of them with you.

When you are done mapping the surface of Vesta for the day, it is good to get outside and away from the computer and see some *gasp* real sunshine. There are several projects that take advantage of the amateur naturalist’s curiosity and outdoor wanderings. Nature’s Notebook allows you to become an observer of plant and animal life around you and has been running for the past four years. iNaturalist is a social media community for this type of observation as well, and includes free mobile apps to help you capture interesting species on the go. These projects are part of a vast effort to track the effects of climate change and human civilization on our fauna and flora neighbors on this planet. And I’m hoping that I can get answers to that ever popular “Ooh, what’s this bug?” question because, yes, I take pictures of cool bugs and things with my phone.

Looked for Bigfoot... found tiny snake.

On a larger scale, you can help classify storm types and strengths with Cyclone Center, which understandably received a bump in participation in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. With a bit more equipment, you can join a more intensive project such as CoCoRAHS, where volunteers monitor local rainfall, snow, hail, and more recently, snow albedo measurements. These make excellent classroom projects as well, because you can get your students out and doing real fieldwork in science.

Of course, you can go outside and participate in astronomy citizen science as well. I mentioned Globe at Night above, and they run several campaigns to estimate sky brightness. You can do something as simple as observe a constellation and report back which stars are visible at your location. A more intense program which has been piloted in Tucson, Arizona, is the Adopt-A-Street Program, which allows users to take responsibility for a whole street, thus covering a grid of locations with sky measurements. Get students involved in the Dark Sky Rangers Program or get your Girl Scout group their Night Owl badge. Globe at Night has also partnered with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory for a “Quiet Skies” Program, something near and dear to my long-wavelength heart. That involves some sensing equipment because, obviously, your eyes can’t pick up radio waves. You can also take some quantitative measurements of visible light pollution with a Sky Quality Meter.

Quiet Skies detection kit at NRAO Astronomy Festival

One particular citizen science effort intrigued me because of the depth of the observations and involvement of the volunteers. Some families in New Hampshire have been making sugar from tree sap for many generations, and they pay particular attention to the state and nature of their trees over decades and centuries. These people have been able to provide scientists with invaluable data about the effects of climate change on the sugar maple as a proxy for the surrounding flora. The sugar makers have gone a step further and collected sap samples for scientists to analyse in addition to their logs. This symbiosis between agriculture and science is so incredible and is going to become more important as the climate continues to change.

So there are many ways that you can participate in scientific research when you are away from your computer, and you can observe our own planet Earth as well as our wider Universe. For many of these projects, having volunteers collect good data is crucial to getting data over a wide variety of regions and times when an army of grad students isn’t necessarily available to do all this work. Science really can involve everyone in this wide world.