Coop’s Citizen Sci Scoop: Bird watchers have themselves to thank (and here is why you should thank them too) - CitizenSci

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-09-08

Summary:

" ... Suddenly I’ve become a stickler for names. Well, for one name. I recently did some digging and had a startling realization: the work of citizen scientists is quite substantial but mostly unacknowledged in the scientific literature! After working for more than a decade with citizen science, I promptly want everyone to know that this – citizen science – is the name for the wonderful phenomenon of ordinary people contributing to science. Sure, there are plenty of other names like crowdsourcing, volunteer monitoring, community-based monitoring, and more. Sure, I used to call it zealous birding (with the utmost respect). But now I realize that if we don’t all call it the same name, then we can’t easily keep track of the important role it plays in the world. I’ve been working with a meteorologist, matching up historic weather data to historic nesting data across the United States. We are examining whether patterns in the occurrence of unhatched eggs in nests can be explained by weather variables. I was attempting a little academic bonding when I asked, 'Isn’t this great that we are using bird citizen science and weather citizen science together? ..."

Link:

http://blogs.plos.org/citizensci/2014/09/04/coops-citizen-sci-scoop-bird-watchers-thank/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.data oa.open_science

Date tagged:

09/08/2014, 15:47

Date published:

09/08/2014, 11:47