Education

By 1900, Trumpeter Swans were extirpated from their nesting and wintering areas in Central and Eastern North America. Their historic migrations to southerly wintering sites were totally destroyed. In recent decades wild nesting populations of Trumpeters have been successfully restored in several northerly states and Ontario. Most swans now winter near their northern breeding areas, but an unknown number are pioneering southward where they are beginning to establish use of more southerly wintering sites.

Little is known regarding the numbers and groupings of southward migrants, the location and characteristics of the sites they are pioneering, the duration of use, or problems they may be encountering. By providing information through Trumpeter Watch, observers can help document the changing distribution of wintering Trumpeter Swans and help identify potential new southerly wintering sites.

Journey North engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change. K-12 students share their own field observations with classmates across North America. They track the coming of spring through the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, gray whales, bald eagles— and other birds and mammals; the budding of plants; changing sunlight; and other natural events. Find migration maps, pictures, standards-based lesson plans, activities and information to help students make local observations and fit them into a global context. Widely considered a best-practices model for education, Journey North is the nation's premiere "citizen science" project for children. The general public is welcome to participate.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is offering a new online
course for educators focused on its successful citizen science program – *PBB
- 501 Project BudBurst: Introduction to Plant Phenology and Climate Change.
* This inaugural offering is *being offered at no charge *to K-12 educators
and is suited for both formal and informal educational settings. This
online course provides all needed information to implement Project BudBurst
(www.budburst.org) in the classroom and engage your students in a national
program by learning more about plants and climate change at a local level.

Act now and be part of the first online course from The BudBurst Academy
that begins on February 15 and take advantage of the *registration fee
being waived*.

Involvement in Project BudBurst will give students valuable experience
collecting data and will give them the opportunity to make meaningful
contributions to ongoing scientific research where scientists are very
interested in the observations students across the county are making.

This professional development course will provide you with detailed
information on Project BudBurst and how to participate including how to
select your plants and make observations, suggestions for structuring your
classroom involvement, classroom activities to engage your students in
making observations, analyzing data, as well as forming a community with
other K-12 educators within Project BudBurst.

Participants in PBB - 501 can sign up for optional graduate level
continuing education credits from Colorado School of Mines. The fee for 2
credits is $90.00

More information can be found at www.budburst.org/academy

Help NASA find life on Mars by exploring the bottom of the lakes of British Columbia, Canada.

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) has been investigating the underwater environment with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.

The PLRP team makes use of DeepWorker subs to explore and document freshwater carbonate formations known as microbialites that thrive in Pavilion and Kelly Lake. Many scientists believe that a better understanding of how and where these rare microbialite formations develop will lead to deeper insights into where signs of life may be found on Mars and beyond. To investigate microbialite formation in detail, terabytes of video footage and photos of the lake bottom are recorded by PLRP's DeepWorker sub pilots. This data must be analyzed to determine what types of features can be found in different parts of the lake. Ultimately, detailed maps can be generated to help answer questions like "how does microbialite texture and size vary with depth?" and "why do microbialites grow in certain parts of the lake but not in others?". But before these questions can be answered, all the data must be analyzed.

Constellation is a platform for different aerospace related projects that need intensive computational power. The platform supports the efforts of participating projects by providing Distributed Computation capability using BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing).

Constellation will send work-units of attached projects to volunteering, idle PCs where the units are processed. The combined power of all volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks in fields from astronomy to aerospace-engineering beginning from student up to university projects. The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the others' simulation by its own solutions.

The platform is an open space for anyone, who is an air and space enthusiast and wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a sub-project on platform. Applications for sub-project are welcome!

SingAboutScience.org has a searchable database which teachers and others can use to find content-rich songs on specific scientific and mathematical topics. Finding and cataloguing all relevant songs is a challenge, however, and volunteers can be used to help with this. Other possible work might entail technical development of the website and assessment of its usability.

Beach WAtchers are volunteers dedicated to protecting Puget Sound through research, education and stewardship. Get 100 hours of university caliber training and craft a volunteer experience to give back 100 hours over two years.

Science Hack Day is a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building 'cool stuff'. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It's time for a Hack Day focused on science!

Do you know what bugs are living near you? Take part in OPAL Bugs Count and discover the incredible variety of invertebrates that make their home around us.

Bugs, or invertebrates, are a vital part of our environment. They can pollinate plants, recycle nutrients, and they provide an important food source for birds and mammals.

Find as many bugs as you can in our timed challenges and keep a special eye out for the six Species Quest bugs.

Your findings will help scientists learn more about the distribution of invertebrates across the country and how the urban environment may be affecting them.

STE - Scuba Tourism for the Environment (www.STEproject.org) is primarily aimed at obtaining information on the Red Sea marine biodiversity state, by collaborating with volunteer dive tourists. In
this way the research can provide the institutions with tools to implement conservation and preservation measures, and at the same time it contributes to the development of ecotourism in the area, providing the tourists with a discerning, active and useful way to increase their naturalistic awareness and recreational value of their holidays.

EcoSpark's Changing Currents program introduces grade 8-12 students from across the Greater Toronto Area (Toronto, Peel, Durham, and York school boards) to their area's watersheds. Students get outside, put on hip waders, explore a local river stream, and learn about its importance and quality.

By participating in the program students will:

use benthic macro-invertebrate bio-monitoring to examine the health of their local river or stream (it's easy!),
contribute to a GTA-wide study of watersheds, and
have the chance to take action around what they discover

The American Chestnut Foundation has several efforts underway to help restore the American Chestnut tree. There are many ways to get involved as a citizen scientist:

1. Hiking and counting American chestnuts. We have a few upcoming training events, usually all done by the end of June. We've been concentrating on the Appalachian Trail, but hope to expand the project beyond there.

2. Planting breeding orchards / germplasm conservation orchards of American chestnuts: Involves planting chestnut trees, maintaining the planting, and sending yearly measurements to our central office.

3. Breeding / Harvesting chestnut trees: Involved finding American chestnuts on which to breed, following their flowering, and performing controlled pollinations on the trees through the end of June and beginning of July. Follow-up during harvest in September and October is the final step. Harvesting can be done on it's own without controlled pollinations

4. Participating in the data collection, testing and selection of advanced breeding materials. If one does not want to plant their own orchard, we hope to match interested people with current growers to help maintain and collect data on orchards already in place.

5. Outreach liaison: More of an outreach position, and potentially less of a citizen science position, but we have continuing need for folks to learn about our program and give presentations to various groups - anyone from girl scouts to Audubon groups and Lions' Clubs - anything of that ilk.

The Seeker, Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N), is looking for approaches to using games and/or game dynamics applications to inspire adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease and other chronic illnesses to create and maintain their own health.

Project Calliope is an upcoming orbiting satellite that will convert Earth's ionosphere to music for people to share. Calliope lets people get a sense of how active space is. Calliope will measure the ionosphere for its 12-week life and transmit that data as sonified MIDI data (akin to sheet music) so anyone with a ham radio or web connection can listen to it-- or remix it into their own music compositions. It is planned to launch into orbit in late 2011.

Get a snapshot of the health of the Boise River watershed by monitoring water quality! Citizen groups, schools, families, and individuals are invited to participate in this fun event which takes place at numerous sites along the Boise River and tributaries from Lucky Peak to Star. No experience necessary! A knowledgeable trainer will meet you at your assigned location to assist with monitoring.

Plant a lilac or a dogwood and contribute to a phenology monitoring project over 50 years in existence! While the dogwood will soon be added to the Cloned Plants Project, the root of the USA-NPN Cloned Plants Project is the historic cloned lilac project. Participants plant a lilac clone and record observations of recurring life cycle stages such as leafing and flowering via the USA-NPN webpage. Observations of cloned plants made over large geographical regions are valuable in predicting crop yields and bloom dates of other species, controlling insect and disease infestations, and assisting with monitoring the impact of global climate change.

The cloned lilac available through the USA-NPN is Syringa x chinensis, 'Red Rothomagensis'. The cloned dogwood soon available is Cornus florida, ‘Appalachian Spring’. Generally, lilacs grow throughout the northern and central US, while dogwoods are better grown by observers in the southeast and gulf states. Review the purchase options on our website, and once you have received your cloned plant, check the information on selecting a site for planting and how to take care of your cloned plant. Cloned plant phenology is observed and recorded using the monitoring instructions found on the How to Observe page and using the details on the plant profile page.

Digitalkoot needs volunteers to fix mistakes in the index of old Finnish newspapers. And you do this by playing games! Your participation will greatly increase the accuracy of text-based searches of the newspaper archives.

Most of the information in the National Library of Finland's newspaper archives has already been copied into computer databases using computerized text recognition. The problem is that computers fail to recognize all the words. Especially when the quality of the source material is poor, the results need to be fixed by hand. This requires a lot of manual work.

The goal of the project is to index the National Library of Finland's enormous archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. This will enable everyone to easily access Finland's cultural heritage.

Digitalkoot is run by the National Library of Finland and Microtask.

The Encyclopedia of Life is an online, collaborative project where you can learn about any species on Earth, as well as contribute information and submit photos. This global initiative seeks to create an "infinitely expandable" resource for all of our planet’s 1.9 million known species.

The Encyclopedia of Life draws from existing databases, such as AmphibiaWeb and Mushroom Observer, and sponsorship from a number of leading scientific organizations. The scientific community and general public can contribute to this growing body of knowledge by posting images to the Flikr group and adding tags and text comments to any species page. In addition, citizen naturalists with a demonstrated commitment to quality science can apply to become curators who are responsible for maintaining the project's vetted content.

Related Material:
Help Build EOL:
http://www.eol.org/content/page/help_build_eol

Contribute photos through our Flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life/

The OPAL Biodiversity Survey needs citizen scientists in England to help uncover the diverse range of wildlife in hedges. By contributing, you'll help researchers learn more about the importance of hedges and how we can improve them.

Hedges support many animals by providing them with food and shelter. Berries and seeds are food for birds, while holes beneath the hedge are often home to small mammals. You’ll also discover caterpillars, shieldbugs and many other invertebrates living among the leaves.

By sharing your observations with the project, reseachers can instantly rate the condition of your hedge and offer suggestions on how to improve it.

This is one of five OPAL surveys across England to learn more about the state of the environment. Anyone can get involved. The studies are open to all ages and abilities, and your contribution will be important in helping scientists build up a picture of England's natural environment.

We are looking for volunteers for our upcoming Yuri's Education Day event at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View this April 8, 2011 as we honor the 50th anniversary of the first astronaut who entered into space, Yuri Gagarin. This upcoming year, we are expecting more than 6,000 attendees from the greater San Francisco Bay Area to join together in a one-of-a-kind experience, and we are excited to create an innovative and interactive learning environment with your help!

On April 8th, from 9am-3pm, bay area educators and students are invited to participate in a free educational extravaganza of science, art, math, technology, engineering, sustainability, and space-related fun. Join us in hosting thousands of elementary, middle, high school, and college students from around the San Francisco Bay Area in an eclectic learning experience featuring presentations, workshops, interactive exhibits, and hands-on activities by prominent scientists, visionaries, space-enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs from multiple disciplines.

Wildlife Health Event Reporter (WHER) is an online, experimental reporting system for reporting and sharing the sightings of sick or dead wildlife. Individual reports viewed together can lead to the detection and containment of wildlife disease outbreaks that may pose a health risk to people, domestic animals and other wildlife. For smart phone users, the HealthMap mobile phone application, Outbreaks Near Me, is also available. It captures the same information that the web-based WHER application collects and allows users to upload photos. Go to http://www.healthmap.org/outbreaksnearme/ to download the application. WHER hopes to harness the power of the many eyes of the public to better detect wildlife disease phenomenon.

Additionally, WHER is run by the Wildlife Disease Information Node (WDIN) in partnership with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center.

PowerSleuth meets PowerMeter invites teachers and students in Maine to examine electricity data and help homeowners monitor how much electricity they’re using while they’re using it.

You’ll engage in a series of investigations and activities using these new tools and other resources to answer questions about home electricity use. Along the way you’ll learn more about electricity - how it’s measured, how customers are charged for their use and how much electricity common household appliances use. As you engage in this work, be sure to keep a good science notebook; record your ideas, what you’re finding out, and the new questions you have. You’ll use your findings to make recommendations for conserving electricity.

Electricity is one of the few things we use first and pay for later. Throughout the month people use electricity in their homes for many different things. At the end of the month, the homeowner receives a bill for the total amount of electricity used during the previous month. The appliances in our homes aren’t marked with price tags so we don’t know as we turn them on them how much electricity they use. Another thing that makes it difficult to keep track of how much electricity our homes are using is we can’t see electricity!

Join the PowerSleuth Meets PowerMeter project and learn a few simple things you and your family can do to save energy.

Let's get started!

The Master Watershed Steward program trains citizens across the state of Arizona to serve as volunteers in the protection, restoration, monitoring, and conservation of their water and watersheds.

We all live in a watershed, also known as a drainage basin or catchment. Each watershed is defined by an area of land that drains water downhill into a common water body. The health of watersheds is especially impacted as our growing population, and thus our demand for natural resources, increases. Learning to look past political boundaries and view land as divided by natural boundaries helps us better manage resources as a complete, more sustainable system.

As a Master Watershed Steward you can help to improve the health of your watershed. The project's informative, research-based training will give you the knowledge to make better, more informed decisions related to your own land, community and watershed. Master Watershed Stewards are highly trained volunteers working closely with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Stewards may come from a variety of backgrounds, but all have a passion for our environment! To become certified, Master Watershed Stewards participate in over 40 hours of course and field work to learn the basics of watershed science.

You work with community organizations including watershed partnerships and various state agencies to implement projects throughout Arizona to monitor, maintain and restore the health of our watersheds. Ongoing volunteer projects include: photopoint monitoring in the Tonto National Forest and Saguaro National Park, riparian assessments along urban and preserved corridors, outreach at Arizona Project WET Water Festivals, free private well testing and collaboration with NEMO to develop Watershed Based Plans.

The Master Watershed Steward Program is a partnership of the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Funding provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality's Water Quality Division.

iSpot is a unique website where you can get the help of a friendly community to identify anything living that you have seen in nature. We are based in the UK, but observations from elsewhere are welcome.

You can add an observation to the website, suggest an identification, or see if anyone else can identify an observation for you.

Help others by adding an identification to an existing observation. Your reputation on the site will grow as others with knowledge agree with you identifications.

Ultimately, the data collected on iSpot are added to a central depository of biodiversity data held by the National Biodiversity Network

We have online keys (also available via web browsers on cell phones) that are designed to help you identify certain groups of species. http://www.ispot.org.uk/webkeys/

What are you waiting for? Get outside and make some observations. :)

The Community Foundation of North Louisiana is focused on helping improve the reading proficiency of elementary (primary) school students in their community. Historically this region of the country has frequently fallen short of the standards set by the rest of the country and they are looking to InnoCentive’s dynamic Solver community to gain new insights and solutions. Many more details are available within the Challenge. This is an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at least one submitted solution.

Submit wildlife and plant sightings into an online community science database. Individuals or group surveys, amateur or professional, all can participate and contribute

Eye on Earth brings together scientific information on air and water quality with feedback and observations from millions of ordinary people. You'll be able to view air and bathing water quality for the majority of Europe as well as provide your own feedback.

Eye on Earth represents a partnership between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency. It includes information on the water quality for more than 22,000 bathing sites throughout Europe. It also includes information on air quality for more than 1,000 air quality monitoring stations throughout Europe.

Over five years, the site will grow to include information on many other environmental topics and turn into a global observatory for environmental change. It will broaden the thematic spectrum of environmental information by integrating prominent environmental challenges of our times, such as ground level ozone and other forms of air pollution, oil sills, biodiversity, and coastal erosion.

Join the fun!

Maryland Science Center's Communicating Climate Change project needs volunteers to take temperature measurements across the urban-rural gradient. The study will look at Urban Heat Islands, which provide a glimpse of what the world will look like with warmer temperatures.

The Urban Heat Island Effect describes the temperature difference between a metropolitan area and the more rural landscape nearby. The Urban Heat Effect is not an effect of climate change, but rather of human activity shaping our environment. One may ask, if we can make changes on a local scale, are we also responsible for changes globally?

The Maryland Science Center and our research partners at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study are proud to join eleven science centers across the nation in the Association of Science and Technology Center’s C3: Communicating Climate Change Citizen Science project.

You too can be a scientist and take part a long term research study!

A citizen science smartphone application is currently in development for 2011. Interested scientists may contact C3@marylandsciencecenter.org to be notified when the application is released to the public.

There is no geographic or age restriction on participation.

SoundCitizen is a community-based water sampling network in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. We’d love your help.

SoundCitizen focuses on scientific investigation and knowledge discovery of the chemical links between urban settings and aquatic systems. We study fun compounds (cooking spices) and serious ones (emerging pollutants).

We are staffed by undergraduate students at the University of Washington, whose individual research topics help define the overall scientific aims of the program.

SoundCitizen encourages involvement with citizen volunteers and school groups, who voluntarily collect water samples from aquatic systems, perform a series of simple chemical tests, and then mail samples to the lab to be analyzed for cooking spices and emerging pollutants. Our scientific findings illustrate strong seasonal links between household activities (cooking, cleaning etc.) and the subsequent release of chemical “fingerprints” of these activities in aquatic and marine environments.

The Mastodon Matrix Project needs citizen volunteers to analyze actual samples of matrix (the dirt) from a 14,000 year old mastodon excavated in New York! Learn the process of science and work like a paleontologist on real research material!

Volunteers sort through the matrix to find shells, bones, hair, pieces of plants, and rocks from the time when the mastodons lived and roamed the Earth. The matrix and discoveries are then sent back to the Paleontological Research Institution, where they will be cataloged and further analyzed by paleontologists to help scientists form a true picture of the ecology and environment of the late Pleistocene.

Mastodons are extinct relatives of modern elephants. Mastodons were numerous and widespread in North America up until around 10,000 years ago, when they became extinct--with many other species--at the end of the last glacial period.

Physics Songs aims to be the world's premier website devoted to collecting and organizing all songs about physics. It is managed by Walter F. Smith, Professor of Physics at Haverford College.

Songs about physics can help students to remember critical concepts and formulas, but perhaps more importantly they communicate the lesson that physics can be fun. They certainly help to establish an informal classroom atmosphere, in which even shy students are willing to ask questions.

The songs may also activate a different part of the students' brains.

Six out of 10 people in the US have never seen our Milky Way Galaxy arch across their night sky from where they live. And the problem of light pollution is quickly getting worse. Within a couple of generations in the U.S., only the national parks will have dark enough skies to see the Milky Way.

Too much outdoor lighting not only affects being able to see the stars, but also wastes energy and money, about 2 to 10 billion dollars a year. And it has been shown to cause sleep disorders in people and to disrupt the habits of animals like newly hatched sea turtles that try to find their way back into the ocean but are disoriented by streetlights.

Light pollution may be a global problem, but the solutions are local. To help people “see the light”, an international star-hunting program for students, teachers, and the general public was created called GLOBE at Night. GLOBE at Night is now in its 5th year and is hosted by the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

This year, the annual event takes place March 3-16, each night from 8-10pm, when there will be no Moon and the constellation, Orion, will be visible to naked eyes from almost any location on Earth. Everyone around the world is invited to participate.

Through this program, children and adults are encouraged to reconnect with the night sky and learn about light pollution and in doing so, become citizen scientists inspired to protect this natural resource. Teachers like the GLOBE at Night program, because it lends itself to cross-curricular learning: astronomy, geography, history, literature, and writing. The possibilities are great.

Find and photograph ladybugs! Join us in finding out where all the ladybugs have gone, so we can try to prevent more native species from becoming so rare.

Across North America, ladybug species distribution is changing. Over the past twenty years, several native ladybugs that were once very common have become extremely rare. During this same time, ladybugs from other places have greatly increased both their numbers and range. Some ladybugs are simply found in new places.

This is happening very quickly and we don’t know how, or why, or what impact it will have on ladybug diversity or the role that ladybugs play in keeping plant-feeding insect populations low.

EnvironMentors provides mentors to high school students from under-represented backgrounds for college degree programs in environmental and related science fields. The program matches minority high school students with college and university faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and science and environmental professionals, in one-to-one mentoring relationships. Working together, students and mentors develop rigorous environmental science research projects over the course of the academic year.

In the spring, EnvironMentors students present their projects to elementary school classes in their respective school districts and to a team of judges at each chapter's EnvironMentors Fair. The top three students from each chapter travel to Washington, D.C., to present their project at the National EnvironMentors Fair.

EnvironMentors' integrative approach to identifying pressing environmental issues through hands-on application of the scientific method supported by a mentor has proven beneficial all students and life-changing for some.

Related Material: Call For EnviroMentors (Science Cheerleader blog): http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2009/08/call_for_environmentors/

The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds working together towBy using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive website, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications.

Each time a rain, hail, or snow storm occurs, volunteers take measurements of precipitation from their registered locations (reports of 'zero' precipitation are encouraged too!). The reports are submitted to the website and are immediately available for viewing. It's educational, but moreover, fun! Just wait until you start comparing how much rain fell in your backyard vs. your neighbor!

The data are used by the National Weather Service, meteorologists, hydrologists, emergency managers, city utilities, insurance adjusters, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, engineers, mosquito control, ranchers and farmers, outdoor and recreation interests, teachers, students, and neighbors in the community.

Related Material: View the 'Story of CoCoRaHS' here: http://www.youtube.com/cocorahs

Track Local Rain, Hail, and Snow Precipitations (Science Cheerleader) at http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2009/01/track_local_rain_hail_and_snow_precipitations/

Citizen Scientists Weathered the Tornado Outbreak (Talking Science) at:
http://www.talkingscience.org/2011/05/citizen-scientists-weathered-the-tornado-outbreak/