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(birds chirping) >>When you think about a scientist, what image pops into your mind?

Maybe it's a very serious nerd with lots of advanced degrees, bad hair, thick glasses, a white lab coat, and of course a clipboard.

Well, there are certainly some that may fit that description but it might surprise you to know that some of the most important science being done today is being done by people just like you and me and it's being done in places just like this.

Most of these people don't hold advanced degrees or make their living as researchers but they do have a special interest in some aspect of nature that allows them to observe and record critical information that is then used by professional researchers, government agencies, conservation organizations, or others, to understand, manage, and protect, the natural world around us.

This is citizen science.

Now you may have heard of citizen science in recent years but just what is this concept?

Citizen science is the collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public.

By its very definition, citizen science is collaborative.

It depends on everyday people like you and me who are curious and concerned about a particular issue.

By helping professional scientists, management agencies or conservation organizations collect the information on the natural world, everyday people are able to help answer important questions that the scientists alone would not be able to answer.

The scope and types of citizen science projects out there is extremely varied, wide as your imagination.

It can range from counting birds and butterflies right in your own backyard to measuring the brightness of the night sky, photographing plants and animals in your area, monitoring bird nests, listening to the calls of toads and frogs and the spring and writing down the species you hear, or something as simple as simply recording the weather data right at your own home.

If there's an issue about which you care or in which you have special interest, the chances are there's some sort of a project out there to which you can contribute.

Most citizen science projects, rely entirely on interested people observing various things in the natural world then recording observations.

The necessary equipment may be just as basic as your own two eyes and may be the camera on your cell phone.

Citizen science is not a new concept, it's been around for centuries.

Much of the early study of North American birds was done by citizen scientist, John James Audubon who described and painted a wide variety of species.

Charles Darwin was a medical school dropout and elapsed theologian before his personal love of the natural world, took him on a voyage around the world, that may be the most important citizen science project of all time.

We can go way back to the likes of Galileo or Copernicus.

Neither one of them was a trained astronomer, one was a medical school dropout, the other managed the business affairs of his local church.

And yet both of them spent their spare time studying the natural world and especially the night sky.

Their findings, their observations changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.

Today, the citizen science movement is growing.

We have an urgent need to learn more about the rapidly changing natural world around us with the incredible advances in technology especially information technology, large groups of people can now rapidly and reliably collect real time information on a wide variety of issues as never before large scale data collection, compilation, and analysis is possible.

Science itself was once shrouded from the general public or even shunned by some sectors of society.

Today, the internet and our ability to access all types of information allows us to actually participate in scientific research in meaningful ways.

We now know that our understanding of the natural world is enhanced when more people get involved and that is the essence of citizen science.

(soft music) >>My name is Krista.

>>And I'm Rick.

>>And we're the Weatherfords.

And we're part of Project FeederWatch.

Project FeederWatch is an opportunity for people to watch their feeders and record data about birds.

So, Cornell University collects the data and then other managing organizations like Department of Wildlife Resources can see what the bird populations are like in particular areas.

So, first we go to Cornell University's website and sign up for Project FeederWatch, next, we put up our feeders and then we start to get out our field identification cards and things like that, so that we can look for those birds.

Next, we start recording the data.

We look for the largest grouping of birds at the feeder at one particular time, and that's what we send in to Cornell.

>>We got involved in this because, well, we're both nature lovers and we enjoy being outside and we enjoy watching birds, and this was an opportunity for us as a family to come together and have a project that we could work on and learn more about birds, and especially during the dreary wintertime.

>>And the kids get so excited.

Oftentimes will hear them call mom, mom look, come and look at the birds, there's so many birds over here at the feeders.

So it's a lot of fun.

>>Yeah, it's not even just when we're recording the data, it's all day long now that we are looking for the birds, we kind of watch the birds all day long.

We are concerned about the environment, we're concerned about the animals and the birds in our neighborhood and in our area.

And we feel that by helping to collect this data it helps somebody to manage it better.

(soft music) >>My name is Michelle Prysby and I'm the Director of the Virginia Master Naturalist Program which is an environmental volunteer program across the State of Virginia.

What science really is is a process for understanding the world around us.

It's not the only way of understanding the world around us but it is a really good and important process that we use.

And that process starts with first, making observations about the world and then that leads us to ask questions about what we're observing.

We make hypotheses or possible explanations of what we're seeing.

And then the really interesting part is we gather evidence or collect data to try to see which of those explanations makes the most sense, analyze those data, draw conclusions from it.

And then a really important part of the scientific process is sharing your findings so that other people can learn from what you found.

Citizen science is the involvement of people who are not professional scientists in real forms of scientific study.

And those people might be involved in any of those steps of the scientific process that we talked about.

They could be involved in asking the questions, they could be involved in generating hypotheses.

Most commonly, they're involved in the data collection part of the process where they're outside gathering data on wildlife populations, or water or any number of other kinds of things.

They might be involved in analyzing the data, and they might be involved in sharing the findings with other people.

The term citizen science is used differently by different groups of people.

The way I tend to use it is as an umbrella term that includes lots of different ways that people who are not professional scientists are involved in that scientific process.

But you might see other terms as well and sometimes they're used interchangeably and sometimes they're used to mean something specific.

Community science is another term that you might often see and frequently that refers to citizen science where the participants, the community are involved in the whole process from the ground up, they're the people generating the questions and taking ownership over the scientific research whatever it is versus a project where there's a professional scientist who has defined the questions and set up the project, and the participants are just doing the data collection.

Citizen science as a term is only a few decades old but the concept of citizen science of people who are not professional scientists being involved in scientific research is much, much older than that.

Some of the earliest projects involved studying birds.

So there was a North American Bird Phenology Program that started back in the late 1800s that involved people in studying bird migrations, and then the Christmas Bird Count which is a project that's known to many people has been going on since 1900 where people are out monitoring bird populations in their area every year in the winter.

Another really long running kind of citizen science project is studying the weather.

So, actually that dates back to at least Thomas Jefferson if not earlier, involving different people in monitoring the weather where they lived and then trying to put those data together to be able to predict the weather better.

And it's amazing but that project still essentially exists today with the National Weather Services Cooperative Observer Program some 12,000 different observers across the US monitoring the weather still hundreds of years later.

And then citizen science really picked up in the 1960s and the 1970s with the environmental movement at that time, especially around the area of water quality, people were really concerned about the health of their creeks and streams and rivers.

And so, they banded together in more of that community science style to try to understand what was going on with the quality of the water where they lived to monitor it, to see if it was healthy and then to do something about it if it was not.

And then, with the advent of the internet citizen science really exploded because it became so much easier to share data to recruit participants, to communicate that just allowed a lot more kinds of projects to be possible.

Anybody can be a citizen scientist because it's really just about using the scientific process, observing, developing hypotheses, asking questions, collecting data all those different pieces.

Any particular citizen science project might require some specific skills.

A bird study might mean that you need to know how to identify some birds for example but really anybody can participate.

(soft music) >>My name is Yohn Sutton.

I'm the Animal Nutrition Keeper here at the Virginia Zoo.

And I'm also the Regional Coordinator for the Association of Zoos and Aquarium FrogWatch USA.

FrogWatch USA is a citizen science program meant to make the community get more involved with the wetland health and diversity of our amphibians and different reptiles.

And what we do mainly is listen to frog calls and report them back as data for future use.

The data can be used through many sources.

So, personally I use the data to submit to state parks in Virginia, to let them know how their wetland are doing with different diverse species of frog and toad.

But for the citizen science person in the general community they can do it to educate themselves so that they know what's in their own neighborhood is the main premise of the course, or they can even submit it to other professionals such as myself if they have questions on whether or not a species should be in a specific area.

Frogs are very important.

They're there as wetland indicators.

So, they're there for a source of food for predators but they're also there to indicate the health of a wetland.

So, they eat mosquitoes and they eat other small things and small insects that we normally wouldn't consider would be a pest until they're gone.

The volunteers in FrogWatch are actually helping me to go places I can't go 'cause there's I can't have 50 of me in a general vicinity so, I teach the citizen scientists how to go into their own communities and actually listen to frog calls and report to me and through AZA or Associations of Zoos and Aquariums, what they actually hear.

And that way we can collectively put all the data together and make like an assumption of how wetland health is doing in say Southeast Virginia.

Some interesting things through FrogWatch that I've learned was that there was a it's a Hyla femoralis, it's a pinewood tree frog is what it's called.

Generally they're usually like a green in color or a brown.

And one night when I was doing a research project with a fellow from the DOD, we actually found a pinewood tree frog that was completely different in coloration like you couldn't tell what it was.

But the only reason why we knew it was a pinewood street frog was from its call that we could record.

(frog calling) So that was one fun project.

Another one was at First Landing State Park years ago when I first started frog watch, they didn't have any record of a carpenter frog there, and when we heard the first carpenter frogs I reported it back to the state manager there.

They were so excited, they wanted us to keep coming back and keep reviewing that 'cause that was something they hadn't heard in about 15 years.

And the most recent one was barking tree frogs at First Landing State Park.

That was another kind of fun one 'cause at the time they were still considered tiered to endangered species in Virginia.

My interpretation of a citizen scientist is someone who wants to be involved with scientific work of some sort to help out either professional, such as myself or resource managers from like a state park or whatnot.

And just somebody who is generally excited to volunteer for the sake of science and the wellbeing of our world.

(soft music) >>Counting birds, listening to and identifying frogs and toads, looking for butterflies, those can all be fun and engaging projects with which to get involved, especially if you are, like I am enjoy spending time outdoors and observing wildlife.

But truly there's a wide array of other projects with which you can get involved right in your own community.

If sitting still and watching for wild animals maybe isn't exactly your thing or maybe you just live in an urban area where there's not that much wildlife to observe, there are still other things you can do.

Water sampling, for example measuring the light pollution in the night sky or other environmental observations right in your immediate area can be very helpful for a variety of scientific projects, right in your own community.

(soft music) >>My name is Devin Jefferson.

I am the Community Science Catalyst at the Science Museum of Virginia.

Being a community science catalyst involves leading the science museum's community science programs that involves participating myself as well as leading as a coordinator all of the volunteers that are a part of the program.

Catalyst is a part of my title because a lot of what I do is to help inspire our community, to enrich their lives through science, and in this case, community science, that means going out into the community or wherever people may be to conduct experiments.

In my work, the difference between community science and citizen science usually lies in the focus on conversation and collaboration with the community.

Citizen science is usually directed by one or a small group of individuals, and that work is usually for the purpose of strict research.

Community science has the benefit of not only gathering data that can be used for research but there is an additional focus on conversation with maybe it is more traditional scientists.

But that conversation usually leads to people having a better understanding around science and topics that can affect them in their daily lives.

I'm involved in a lot of projects here at the science museum.

Throwing Shade is just one of those projects, and that is our community science projects to create a heat map for the City of Richmond.

And that has involved us going out to collect temperature measurements with our volunteers and use that information to continue community conversations around climate resilience issues, equity issues, and also help people connect a little bit more easily to science in their neighborhoods.

I also lead RVAir which is the science museum's air quality study for the City of Richmond.

And with that project we've been going out, walking, biking, driving around the city to collect air quality data to help continue the conversation around air pollution and how it can potentially affect people in their daily lives.

Some of the benefits for that data collection process has been people getting a better understanding of their environment and the different aspects that can affect them whether that's temperature and simply knowing when it's too hot to be outside or whether it's air quality and saying how I have asthma there's a code orange that's been issued by the department of environmental quality.

Maybe I shouldn't be outside all day today.

Training for these programs usually is specialized but not difficult.

So, you're not gonna use a lot of the skills or some of the specific skills that you pick up in everyday life but you'll be able to engage in other science experiments a little bit more easily as a result for example, with Throwing Shade.

We trained our participants to mount the sensors to their cars, to show them how to turn on the sensors to make sure they were running properly, and to then drive safely to collect that data and remove the mounts, remove the sensors and give them back to us.

And so then from there, we worried about the data.

The difference between Throwing Shade training and RVAir training is that RVAir was a little bit more involved.

We were able who train people how to use the app, the air casting app for that data collection and connect it to the sensors.

Thankfully, the process for connecting the sensors for RVAir is a lot easier, the app is really intuitive and it walks you through this process step by step from all the way from turning your sensor on to naming the session that you're collecting.

Training for RVAir also involved data interpretation, which was really cool because we were able to show people how to look at that data in real time and immediately makes some baseline some baseline interpretations about what we're seeing.

The benefit of the volunteers being from Richmond and being members of the community means that when people collect this data, when people are a part of the project, it makes that experience and those lessons learned much more personal.

It makes the idea of science a little less intimidating and it helps people think about science and maybe in a different way that they might not normally have been able to connect to before, and hopefully, that leads to some community led decisions, it leads to meaningful conversation and more importantly actions at the end of those conversations that can benefit the community on a whole.

(upbeat music) >>I'm Connor Gillespie I'm the Outreach Coordinator at the Wildlife Center of Virginia.

And in my position, I do a lot of public programs, I help teach people about wildlife, the problems that they're facing in the wild and ways to help them.

People generally contact the wildlife center because they find an animal that they are concerned about.

They're concerned that it might be injured, it might be orphaned, maybe they think it has some type of illness, and so they reach out to us.

And what we'll do is we'll help them figure out what's truly going on with that animal.

If it does need help, we'll give them some instructions on how to safely contain it and how to bring it to the closest wildlife rehabber to them.

So, wildlife rescuers or even people that just call us about wildlife situations that they're encountering, that they have questions about are really acting as citizen scientists, without even knowing it.

And that's because they are providing us with important information on wildlife injuries, how these injuries are occurring and what species are most impacted.

Because the public frequently encounter wildlife in their daily lives, they're often the first to notice new and emerging wildlife issues and also pinpoint where those issues are taking place.

A great example of this, is the avian mortality event that occurred in the summer of 2021.

People in multiple states began finding sick and dying birds and they reported these sightings to their respective state agency.

So like to the game departments or to different wildlife centers.

And because of these detailed reports, wildlife managers realized what the common symptoms of this disease were, which species were primarily affected, and where this disease was spreading to.

Wildlife rehabilitators are themselves citizen scientists because they're often the first to recognize major wildlife issues from the thousands of injured and ill patients that they admit every single year.

And this is information that biologists and researchers would be unable to collect themselves.

At the wildlife center, every time we admit a patient, we're collecting a lot of information, including where that animal was from, how it was injured, and the circumstances of its rescue.

And all of this information is stored in our online database, which is shared openly with other wildlife hospitals and researchers and scientists around the world, which allows them to see and quantify the effects of certain types of injuries on different wildlife populations.

In some ways, you might say that the wildlife center is a massive citizen science project with every person that brings us an animal contributing to our overall knowledge of the types of injuries and challenges that it faces in the wild.

(soft music) >>If you would like to get involved in citizen science there are certainly many things you can do and many options available to you.

You just need to look around for something that matches your interest and experience.

Contact community groups like the local bird club, the master naturalist organization, or a local nature center, they can almost always make suggestions.

Check with your state wildlife management agency or natural resources management agency for referrals to local projects.

You can even contact national organizations that are interested in or conserve the species of wildlife in which you are interested and see what they can suggest about local chapters or local activities with opportunities for you to participate.

And finally, get ready to be a citizen scientist, get some good field guides, practice your identification skills.

Your ability to contribute to these projects will depend on your ability to accurately recognize what you're observing.

Then when you find a project that interests you spread the word, get your family and friends involved.

You can visit the Wildlife Center of Virginia's website for more information and more options on how you can become a citizen scientist.

>>Funding for UNTAMED is made possible by.

(birds chirping) (upbeat music)