Citizen Scientists

Hi everyone,

Here's an article from the National Geographic:

Experts once feared the nine-spotted ladybug was going instinct. That was until Peter Priolo, a volunteer ladybug hunter, saw one on a sunflower on Long Island, New York, two years ago. Priolo was thrilled. So was the Lost Ladybug Project, which is studying North American ladybugs with an assist from ordinary people - a practice known as crowdsourcing. The nine-spotted ladybug was once so common that a fifth grader successfully lobbied for it to become the New York State insect. But introduced species, it seems, have moved in and are eating the nine-spot's lunch. "In the future, crowdsourcing may pick up an invasive species before it's too late to get rid of it," says Cornell entomologist John Losey, the project's director.
Enlisting ordinary citizens isn't new to science. As early as the 1700s European bird surveys included reports from backyard birders. Amateur astronomers, weather-watchers, and other hobbyists have also made contributions. What's different today is the Internet, which has helped recruit hundreds of thousands of volunteers over the past decade. Choosing from projects, participants may share photos or answer a researcher's questions.
Social media are the latest way to get citizens excited about conservation. Coming soon: a Facebook app that lets people pick a whale shark to "like." Destined for viral fame is the specimen with a damaged tail that often turns up in waters off Western Australia. Researchers call him Stumpy the Shark.

(A. R. Williams)

Hi Gerard, everyone
We are all scientists and responsible of the world which is a very good thing

Hi Muriel, hi everyone,

> We are all scientists and responsible of the world which is a very good thing
You mean we all feel scientist or we must be but the article is practical and speaks about volunteers who work with professionals and help them do very important tasks.
Yes, we should feel responsible for our world but...

We are here in the pragmatic world and not psychological...

You may know about the possibilities of personal computers providing free work time when the users are not in front of them to participate in huge projets such as genomic research or prime numbers or others.

gerardM a écrit: participate in huge projets such as genomic research or prime numbers or others.

Of course I could not help because I don't know much about these sciences

Muriel,

I may have written poor explanations... in my last examples (the ones you quotted) people just have to set up their computers so that they can be automatically used by external servers.
The servers use the power of millions of individual computers et perform parts of the calculation. PC owners don't have to be savvy in anything, they just provide computer time.

Hi everyone,

Below are a few projects with a high participation of "Citizen Scientists":
- Lacewings (Semachrysa jade) - A California entomologist saw a Malaysian lacewing with an odd pattern on Flickr, a website for sharing photos, and identified it as a new species.
There are 10.5 million photos of animals and insects on Flickr.
- Ladybugs (coccinella novemnotata) - Volunteers report sightings to the Lost Ladybug Project. They've established that the nine-spotted ladybug, New York's state insect, hasn't vanished from the area but is still rare.
475 species mapped on the project's wabsite.
29 years is the time between the last nine-spotted sighting in New York and the project's first in 2011.
180 nine-spotted ladybugs seen in the U.S. and Canada since the project went online in 2008.
- Whale shark (Rhincodon typus) - The Ecocean Whale Shark Photo-identification Library collects images shot by divers. Up to 65 feet long, whale sharks, the world's largest fish, are now hunted and vulnerable to extinction. But numbers aren't as dire as once thought.
320 sightings reported between 1828 and 1986.
4,024 individual whale sharks identified in the Ecocean library photos.
21,279 sightings of whale sharks reported to the Ecocean library since 2003.
Each whale shark has a unique pattern of dots on the skin behind the gills, enabling Ecocean to identify individuals from photos. The painstaking work has been automated with a computer program adapted from Hubble Space Telescope star-mapping software.
- Moths (Manduca sexta) - To help a University of Georgia professor classify his moth photos, Citizen Sort offers two online "games" that ask players questions about colors, patterns, and shapes.
46,634 photos of moths to identify.
186,536 data points that will be created once all games are completed.
- Elephants (Loxodonta africana) - Photos from locals, guides, and tourists help ElephantVoices study the animal's behavior and movements in Kenya's Masai Mara region to better protect them.
871 individual adult elephants whose photos have been uploaded to the ElephantVoices website since 2011.
10 kilometer radius: the daily distance a researcher typically travels from base camp while tracking elephants.
9,000 square kilometers in the Masai Mara ecosystem.