The Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, the Interdisciplinary Center for Coastal Studies, New York Botanical Garden, Puerto Rico Youth at Risk, Boy Scouts, and others implemented a citizen science program for age 12 and older. This project targeted local residents, visitors to Hacienda La Esperanza Reserve, and members of community environmental projects on topics including archeology and human impacts on local ecosystems; conservation and restoration of wetlands; and shoreline and costal processes.
Gastineau Guiding Company created this exciting tour program to look for ways to foster connections between citizens and science. With the help of two local non-profits, the Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program and the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation a tour with purpose was born. Our objectives include sampling phytoplankton to identify possible "red tide" outbreaks, contributing photographs to aid in the identification of area humpback whales and mammals, providing baseline data for several researchers throughout the state of Alaska, and contributing to online citizen science databases utilized by researchers around the country. During each summer season cruise line travelers' direct participation and observation can give a little something back, deepening our understanding of local wilderness and wildlife.
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National Great Rivers Research and Education CenterGastineau Guiding Company
Nature Abounds announces Watch the Wild™, a program where citizen science volunteers observe and report on the “wild” in your community, from trees and plants to weather and wildlife activity. By monitoring the "wild", observations can help us to understand how our eco-systems are changing and aids us in adapting for the future.
This Volunteer Water Quality Monitoring National Facilitation Project is designed to build a comprehensive support system for Extension-affiliated and other volunteer water quality monitoring efforts across the country. The goal is to expand and strengthen the capacity of existing volunteer monitoring programs and support development of new groups. We have developed a modular "Guide for Growing CSREES Volunteer Monitoring Programs" to direct you to resources and help you start asking questions that you’ll need to answer in order to create an effective program that meets the needs of your community. The Guide has been designed as a series of ‘chapters’ or modules that can be used alone or in conjunction with other modules. The Guide brings together the excellent resources produced by a wide variety of monitoring programs or agencies with numerous references and links to a wide variety of materials.
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United States Department of AgricultureUniversity of Rhode Island Cooperative ExtensionSalish-Kootenal CollegeUniversity of Wisconsin ExtensionLinda Green
The Vanessa Migration Project is a citizen science program that has been active since April 2001 as part of the Red Admiral and Painted Lady Research Site. Citizen observers in North America report their sightings of date, location, flight direction, and other activity of four butterflies of the genus Vanessa (V. atalanta, V. cardui, V. virginiensis, and V. annabella). Objectives include 1) monitoring butterflies and their yearly seasonal distribution; 2) tracking migrations and outbreaks; and 3) studying effects of weather and climatic patterns on butterfly activity.
The USA National Phenology Network brings together citizen scientists, government agencies, non-profit groups, educators and students of all ages to monitor the impacts of climate change on plants and animals in the United States. The network harnesses the power of people and the Internet to collect and share information, providing researchers with far more data than they could collect alone.
GSWA's stream team monitors the 5 streams in the watershed through chemical and visual assessments. Training is required for all new volunteers. The primary goal of the chemical monitoring program is to measure the volume of water, nutrients and sediments flowing into the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The main purpose of the visual assessment program is to help gather data for the Watershed Association and the State on waterbodies that are not currently being assessed by the NJDEP. All of this data helps to generate a picture of the overall health of our streams and help to identify areas where where water quality improvements could be made.
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Great Swamp Watershed AssociationKelley Curran
Stream Monitoring is a statewide program for Wisconsin citizens interested in learning about and improving the quality of Wisconsin’s streams and rivers. As a volunteer for monitoring through Beaver Creek Reserve Citizen Science Center, you will collect information once a month May through September from one of the numerous streams in the Lower Chippewa Basin. To become a volunteer, you will need to attend a day-long training session to learn how to measure and record the stream data. There are two levels for stream monitoring; level 2 monitoring requires additional training and you are assigned specific streams and times to monitor them.
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Beaver Creek ReserveWisconsin Department of Natural ResourcesSarah Braun
Each summer, a team of RHA staff members and volunteers collect samples of benthic macro-invertebrates, small critters whose presence indicate a stream’s health, at over fifty sites on streams and rivers in Hunterdon, Morris and Somerset Counties. Through our stream monitoring program, we gather valuable, usable data about surface water quality and the overall health of our watersheds.
Rothamsted Research is the oldest agricultural research station in the world. It is internationally recognised for its long history of entomological studies, including the Rothamsted Insect Survey which has operated a national network of light traps since 1968. Most of the traps are operated by volunteers, with approximately 90 traps running each year. Altogether, over 460 sites have run for a minimum of one year and 54 have operated for at least 15 years. This has become one of the world’s largest and broadest contemporary insect biodiversity databases, with over 12 million individual macro-moth records. These records are used for fundamental ecological research, linking the effects of land use and climate change with population and distribution changes of common British moths. Recently, data have been used to show dramatic declines and changes in distribution for many common species throughout the UK.
The NJ Watershed Watch Network is a program acting as an umbrella for all of the volunteer monitoring programs within New Jersey. The goal of this new program is to provide acceptable protocols and QA/QC requirements for volunteers if they chose to submit their data to the NJDEP, to assist volunteers in designing and building upon their existing programs and assist data users in gathering sound data for their uses.