Pacific Biodiversity Institute has several ongoing citizen science projects that might interest you and your students. We are based in Washington State with offices in Winthrop and Anacortes. You can learn more about the work we are doing here: www.pacificbio.org
One of our long-term citizen science projects focuses on the western gray squirrel (a threatened species here in Washington State). It involves fieldwork, mapping and data analysis of both squirrel populations and habitat. The next 3 years we are assisting WDFW in a statewide squirrel population survey. Much of the fieldwork in the statewide survey will occur in various parts of eastern Washington. We are doing a study of the biological and ecological response to the 2014 Carlton Complex wildfire (256,000 acres) here in Okanogan County. It is just beginning, and will engage volunteer citizen scientists. We are also doing a long-term citizen science project focused on the harbor porpoise in the Salish Sea that involves land-based observations, underwater acoustic monitoring and lots of data analysis and mapping. That project may be too remote for your students to be interested or involved. And one of our biggest projects focuses on wildlands and their biodiversity in South America. Our current focus is in Argentina, where we have a small office and a full-time conservation biologist and an intern (both Argentines) involved. However, many volunteer citizen scientists have contributed significantly to this project. That includes 26 University of Washington conservation biology students during the winter quarter of 2014. The students chose from a list of endangered and charismatic species that inhabit wildlands in northern Argentina and did library/internet research on their selected species and then wrote detailed reports and a shorter feature story about each species. The students got a lot out of that project and it has been a great benefit to our efforts as well. You can read the reports on a page on our website: http://www.pacificbio.org/initiatives/sur_america/species_list.html We could use similar reports on the major ecosystems in parts of South America (something perhaps more fitting to ecology students). And we could explore other ways that they could help. We integrate a lot of GIS mapping and analysis into our work, so that is one way students could get involved. Cheers, Peter Morrison Executive Director Pacific Biodiversity Institute PO Box 298 Winthrop, WA 98862 [email protected] www.pacificbio.org office phone: 509-996-2490 mobile phone: 206-755-0961 -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Justin Bastow Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 11:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Citizen Science projects for upper division ecology students Hello everyone, I am going to ask my upper division ecology lab students to participate in a citizen science project this quarter and write a short summary of their involvement. I am putting together a list of suggested projects for them to get involved in, and was wondering if you had citizen science projects that you would recommend. They should be ecology related (obviously, but in a broad sense), and should be open to students located in Washington state (but they do NOT have to be at all specific to the Pacific Northwest). I am using Wikipedia's list of citizen science projects as a resource, so I would be especially interested in projects that you know about that have not made it onto that list, but would also be interested in feedback about some of those projects if you have experience with them. Thanks, Justin Bastow
