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JULIA PARRISH: COASST is a 16 year old citizen science
organization based at a university and run by
scientists. What we do is go out to coastal communities,
small coastal communities, from Northern California all the way
on up to Kotzebue in Alaska; that's above the Arctic Circle
then over the Commander Islands in Russia, kind of a big
footprint. And when we're there we're recruiting local coastal
residents to come spend five hours training with us. What
are we teaching them to do? This sounds super geeky. We're
teaching them to go to their beach and search for dead birds,
birds that have washed in the tide.
When they find those birds they're using specific tools
that we give them to record data and from that data make a
deduction, a scientific deduction, and that deduction is
basically what species do I have in front of me? So they're not
guessing, and they're not flipping through the book and
holding it up like doing the flower colors. They're actually
taking measurements like a wing, or foot measurement, or a bill
measurement and looking at a particular shape of foot, how
many toes, where are they? And then using that information to
figure out what do I have in front of me.
We validate every single observation. So if you're out
there on the beach and you say, "That's a common murre," you're
sending the evidence back to us, so our experts in house can look
at those measurements and look at the photographs that you've
taken, and look at the comments that you've made and say, "Yep,
you're right, that was a common murre." Or no, "That's actually
a marbled murrelet and here's how to tell the difference."
Other kinds of programs have so many people out there collecting
information that even though each individual observation
isn't validated we can use statistical techniques to prune
them off. So if you send an E-Bird report that says, "I saw
twenty whooping cranes," like as not we're going to prune that
out of the dataset.
So citizen science gives us some of the longest running, broadest
spatial extent data that we have that tells us where organisms
were when and that really is the basis on which we can not only
do biodiversity science, we can also do applied science. We can
take that data and we can ask questions about, well, are there
as many Carolina wrens here now as there were before? Has there
been a shift in what we're seeing in albatross populations
as a function of fisheries?
As we've experienced climate change and global warming and an
increase in sea surface temperature, do we see a shift
in the distribution of seabird populations or a change in the
migration pattern? In my program we experience all
of those things as literally bodies washing up on the
beach at different times.
So why go out and spend not only a glorious day in the summer,
but a cold, windy, rainy day in the winter, why do that?
Because you know that your time and the data that you collect
will be well used and used in a way that you as an individual
couldn't have that same voice. So it allows everybody
to participate in science and through science to have a larger
voice in the community.
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