A call for scientists to call on citizens

A research paper in tomorrow’s Science shows that higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide inhibit plants’ ability to take up nitrogen from the soil. This counteracts much of the boost plants get from breathing more carbon dioxide, and it could pose a threat to agriculture.

What flashed in my mind when I saw the paper was that I’d like to find a way to track changes in the Community Supported Agriculture farm I belong to. I’ve been a member for more than a decade and I’m likely to remain so for years to come. Maybe I could contribute to climate change science by collecting data. But there are several problems: I don’t know what data to collect or how to collect it, and I don’t know who to collect it for.

Citizen science, the idea of ordinary citizens contributing to science, could be especially helpful for monitoring the effects of climate change. People are everywhere, and they usually have the means of communicating what they observe.

A research paper in the April 6, 2007 Science is a good example of the potential of citizen science. The paper showed that the length of the fungi fruiting season in southern England more than doubled in the last half century due to warmer summers and wetter autumns. The data for the paper — more than 55,000 records — was collected between 1950 and 2005 by a nonscientist.

Scientist and writer Aaron E. Hirsh wrote an essay in the New York Times in 2009 that called for greater citizen participation in science. He singled out climate change:

“Widespread networks of observers are especially well-suited to detecting global change — shifts in weather patterns; movements in the ranges of species; large-scale transformations of eco-systems…”

Hirsh wrote the essay before a series of stolen e-mails touched off the recent media storm that has hurt climate scientists’ standing with the public, but it could hold the key to repairing the damage and preventing similar events in the future. As Hersh put it:

“What may be most important about Citizen Science is what it could mean for the relationship between citizens and science. When everyone is gathering data, that rather austere and forbidding tower becomes a shared human pursuit.”

An example of climate change citizen science is Project BudBurst, which taps the public to collect data about the timing of leafing and flowering.

I’d like to see more scientists develop how-to kits for citizens. Online tools should make developing and promoting citizen science fairly straightforward. Websites with how-to videos and forms for recording data are well within the means of most researchers.

Social media could be useful for matching citizens with science projects. The data collector in the fungi study was the lead author’s father. The key is making it easy for people without connections in the world of science to contribute.

A few questions: how do we expand citizen science beyond visual observations of plants and animals? For example, are there ways citizens can contribute to monitoring the hydrological cycle, say by collecting data on soil moisture? What about collecting and transporting samples?

I imagine a network of laboratories that cooperate by analyzing locally-collected samples and making the results available to researchers around the world. If that were to materialize, it would be no sweat for me to swing by a nearby university to drop off samples on my way home from picking up the vegetables.