Citizen Science Project: Caterpillars Count! (NR5724) - Introduction (1)

Home To Sea Followers,

Hello. As we are all aware, the world is quite a large place, much too large for the number of scientists and conservationists to attend to. Luckily, the effort to protect, preserve, and conserve our planet does not have to fall solely on their shoulders. Solution - Citizen Science Projects. As defined by the Oxford dictionary, a citizen science project is "scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions." Who is the general public? That's you and I.

In this series, we will dig a bit into a citizen science project that I conducted, "Caterpillars Count!," Caterpillars Count!. This citizen science project is part is led by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, part of the Pheno Mismatch, funded by the National Science Foundation.

So, now to the what and why? The purpose of this project is for measuring the seasonal variation, also known as phenology, and abundance of arthropods such as caterpillars, beetles, and spiders found on the foliage of trees and shrubs. The reference noted below was the jumping point for this project as well as the larger project, Pheno Mismatch.

If you remember our post on invasive species, some of those will circle back around in this series as well as one we did not cover. In addition, we will look at a few other arthropods besides just caterpillars, beetles, spiders. To spice it up even further, we will throw in a gastropod or two, which ties back into our invasive species conversation.

In any good citizen science project endeavor, it can important for one to examine the framework for strengths as well as potential areas of development. With that said, this series will be broken down into the following posts: Introduction, Project Design, Public Outreach, and Participation Journal which includes the data results of the week long project. 

Please do note that this will remain an ongoing project with future posts/data to follow. 

Reference:

Mayor, S.J, R.P. Guralnick, M.W. Tingley, J. Otegui, J.C. Withey, S.C. Elmendorf, M.E. Andrew, L Leyk, I.S. Pearse, & D.C. Schneider. 2017. Increasing asynchrony between arrival of migratory birds and spring green-up. Scientific Reports, 7:1902.