CHAPTER 14

Making and Sharing Data as a Citizen Scientist

Introduction to Citizen Science

As we talked about in Chapter 13, scientists and makers who are sharing scientific tools enable everyone to be a scientist. This is helping a growing trend called citizen science. Citizen science (sometimes called crowdsourced science or civic science) is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur scientists. You can become a citizen scientist simply by wanting to be one. Citizen science is just scientific research done by members of the general public, although it is often done in collaboration or under the direction of professional scientists and fancy scientific institutions. Citizen science can be really useful, and somewhat amazingly, volunteer citizen scientists can provide data that are in general of reliably high quality, on par with those produced by professionals (Kosmala et al., 2016).

As a working scientist, I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is a really good feeling to discover something about our world that no one else knows and to share that information with everyone else to try to help the common good. To be a professional scientist involves being dedicated to long, hard, and expensive training, which is a pretty big barrier for most people to enjoying my profession. Now, with the advent of citizen science, however, literally everyone can donate a small amount of their time to participate in the scientific endeavor and make a concrete contribution to the body of knowledge for humanity. There are hundreds of projects you can become involved with, which I will discuss in the next section. My advice is to try a bunch of them to see what you like and only commit to the ones you are really interested in personally. In addition, if you have children doing citizen science attached to whatever they are learning about, it becomes much more interesting and easier to learn. It is good to be able to learn answers given in a textbook, but it is much more exciting to help identify real wildlife or discover new galaxies.

Easy First Steps into Citizen Science

Citizen science may appear to be a bit intimidating at first, but you probably already do things—like posting selfies on the web—that can be easily adapted to participate in citizen science. Take, for example, Project Soothe (www.projectsoothe.com). It is all about helping us soothe ourselves. Research and psychological therapy have shown that if you have the ability to soothe yourself at times of distress, it will help you to stay well. But how do people actually do this in everyday life? It turns out that scientists don’t have a good handle on that yet. Project Soothe is helping them get a better understanding by having you send them photos that make you feel soothed. From Chapter 3, you already know how to use open-source tools and licenses to deal with photos. Project Soothe asks that you post your soothing images on its website gallery, and then it collects feedback from viewers about whether your images make them feel soothed as well. All the images from all the citizen scientists will then be combined into a large bank of photos for use in future research and psychological therapies.

Zooniverse

You can join Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), which is the world’s largest group (more than a million volunteers) for research powered by citizen scientists just like you. Currently, Zooniverse has more than 100 active projects, and volunteers have contributed data to more than 2,500 published studies (as of 2020). You can join hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world who come together to assist professional researchers while learning a little science for fun at the same time. Zooniverse projects are not passive—they require your active participation to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from such disciplines as astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science. Zooniverse has projects in nearly every area of interest, including, for example, the following:

  Helping analyze wildlife photographs to track big cats, such as the leopard in Figure 14.1. A critical part of protecting big cats and their landscapes is documenting the presence and behavior of wild cats using automated cameras. Every year, Panthera’s motion-activated cameras collect hundreds of thousands of wildlife images. With your help, the Panthera project can identify the animals, which enables tracking of wild cat population trends over time and determination of the best conservation actions to better protect them.

Figure 14.1 A screen shot of a citizen science project to analyze wildlife photos to help Panthera protect big cats. https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/panthera-research/camera-catalogue/classify

  Helping the Smithsonian Institution better understand climate change with the Fossil Atmospheres Project. You can help to create a record of how the atmosphere has changed through time by calculating the ratio of two different types of leaf cells (stomatal and epidermal) for many leaves from the present and from the geologic past. We know that the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere has changed over time and that it is changing now. It is important for us to understand what effect climate change might have on life on our planet in the long term, and your digital microscopy work can help to do it.

  Likewise, helping to sort out the complexity of sunspots to better understand the sun.

  Do you have a good ear? Maybe you could help characterize bat calls to better understand bats.

  Helping scientists better understand disease and support human health with the project Science Scribbler: Virus Factory. This project is currently trying to understand how viruses multiply inside cells, which seems particularly urgent today.

  Helping the physics community search for unknown exotic particles.

The Zooniverse also has projects that are outside the hard sciences, such as in history (e.g., annotate war diaries from World War I) and the arts (e.g., transcribe documents from long-dead artists or help understand Shakespeare better by learning about his contemporaries).

Citizen Science for Uncle Sam

CitizenScience.gov is the official government website for crowdsourcing and citizen science across all the scientific research sponsored by the U.S. government. It has a catalog of dozens of federally supported citizen science projects that you can use to get involved. These projects can be fun afternoons in your backyard or can be deadly serious. For an example of pure fun, Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA; www.butterfliesandmoths.org) is collecting, storing, and sharing species information and occurrence data. You can participate by taking and submitting photographs of butterflies, moths, and caterpillars in your backyard. The data entry is simple, as shown in Figure 14.2, and your results are verified by professionals. The BAMONA project is based on work previously supported by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Figure 14.2 A screen shot of one of millions of verified moth and butterfly sightings. This one is a Baltimore Checkerspot used by the BAMONA project. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/

Not all insects are pure fun. In fact, some insects are the exact opposite of fun, like the irritating mosquito responsible for outbreaks of transmitted pathogens such as West Nile virus, Eastern equine encephalitis, dengue, and chikungunya. To help battle back against the mosquitoes, you can join the Invasive Mosquito Project (www.citizenscience.us/imp). It is aimed at monitoring invasive container-inhabiting mosquito species across America. Your research will help determine where the native and invasive mosquito species are distributed across the United States and figure out who is at risk. This is a bit of a more hard-core citizen science project because it provides anyone interested with the opportunity for training to collect real data and contribute to a national mosquito species distribution study. This project not only gives you an opportunity to explore and collect data around your house, it also raises awareness of diseases that can be transmitted by mosquitoes and how you can protect yourself, your family, and your pets from illness.

You can also help medical scientists better understand people so they can help cure diseases you may have in the future. For example, EyeWire (eyewire.org) investigators are solving the mysteries of the brain with your help. Best of all, you do this by playing a game that is really a 3D neuroscience coloring book. This puzzle game that anyone can play without any experience in neuroscience helps EyeWire researchers map the retina. Eventually, EyeWire wants to map the human brain, but it is starting small. When you play the game, you are mapping the connections between retinal neurons, helping researchers understand how neurons process information. Past game players have already helped researchers understand how we can detect motion, and they hope that your help can lead to advances in blindness therapies and the development of retinal prosthetics. Not a bad outcome for playing a fun game!

Citizen science projects are much bigger than our bodies and backyards—they go all the way to space. NASA has been an early and aggressive user of citizen science. NASA sponsors NASA SOLVE (www.nasa.gov/solve), which is a one-stop shop to find opportunities to participate in challenges, prize competitions, and citizen science activities that help NASA’s mission. For example, you can help NASA scientists map the moon with Cosmoquest (cosmoquest.org/x/science/moon). The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter provided the images necessary to map out features only a few meters across over the surface of the moon. Unfortunately, software can’t do this mapping yet, and NASA doesn’t have the human resources needed to map out the entire moon. NASA needs to collect a diverse enough data set that it can train machine-learning algorithms to find craters in different kinds of soils and under different lighting conditions. To make sure that nothing is missed, NASA scientists have overlaps, and each area is looked at using different magnifications. The scientists will show you some images from a ½ to 1 square kilometer in size. Your efforts will train algorithms and speed up the process. This is a chance to do some good for NASA while you look at some super-close-up images of the moon, as in Figure 14.3. This is not something you probably want to do for a long time, but NASA has set it up so you can listen and learn about the moon while you flex your citizen science mental muscles.

Not all of the NASA projects are done on a computer. For example, if you live in the North and like to go outside at night, you can join the Aurorasaurus project (aurorasaurus.org). The goal for Aurorasaurus is to spot the aurora and report it. Your report will help others see it. Acting as a volunteer, you can use the website or Android apps to get alerts, help find real-time sightings from social media, and learn about the auroras.

Figure 14.3 A screenshot of Moon Mappers, where I have identified two craters on the moon for NASA. https://cosmoquest.org/x/science/moon/

If you are really interested in space and have your own telescope, you could help NASA keep track of asteroids with Target Asteroids! (www.asteroidmission.org). You send your telescope images and data for asteroids that are important to the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission and directly help our understanding of near-Earth asteroids. These combined observations enable scientists at NASA and at universities throughout the world to better understand the physical properties of asteroids for which little information is known, refine their orbits, and determine their parent asteroid families. If you don’t own a telescope, NASA also runs annual month-long measuring campaigns for citizen scientists to provide images from large telescopes at dark-sky sites to a limited number of “measurers,” who submit asteroid data to the Target Asteroids! program.

Meanwhile, NASA is also interested in helping us better understand our own planet with (again) your help. For example, landslides cause billions of dollars in infrastructural damage and thousands of deaths every year worldwide. As a society, we can try to prevent them and prevent the damage they cause from being so great. Data on past landslide events help guide us to make better future disaster prevention plans. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to get data on all the landslides. We don’t have a global picture of exactly when and where landslides occur. NASA is building the biggest open global landslide inventory to address this problem. The Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) is an open platform where citizen scientists can share landslide reports. You can add data to COOLR using the Landslide Reporter (landslides.nasa.gov/reporter and then see all landslide data from COOLR with Landslide Viewer (https://landslides.nasa.gov/viewer).

When You Can’t Trust the Government: Measure Your Own Risk

Although, in general, government scientists are trustworthy, there have been many attempts to either muzzle them, distort their findings, or cut their funding when they say politically uncomfortable things. In the popular media, this has been labeled a “war on science.” Long before science was so politicized in the United States, however, there were specific technical areas where, for whatever reason, the American public had only been given an incomplete truth. One of those areas is the nuclear power industry, which is the only business incapable of covering its own liability insurance cost without a government guarantee (Pearce, 2009, 2012; Zelenika-Zovko and Pearce, 2011). The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1983) found that the economic value of this liability cap was so large that it could be referred to as a subsidy. Calculating how much nuclear liability insurance is subsidized with the arbitrary liability caps is really hard, and there are a bunch of studies trying to figure it out. It should be easy, however, to figure out how much things cost after a disaster because postmortem calculations can be used to calculate insurance costs—or at least that is what I thought.

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011 and caused nuclear radiation leakages in Fukushima presented a unique opportunity—a modern disaster in a technically advanced democratic and open society. Using openly available data, it should have been easy to calculate the insurance subsidy. We looked at the Fukushima (Daiichi) nuclear power plant disaster to find the true cost of the liability insurance needed to cover the damage based on news reports. This sounds easy, but the news reports all conflicted with one another. There were no retractions, no fixed values. The reported costs of the Fukushima nuclear disaster are somewhere between $20 billion and $525 billion (Laureto and Pearce, 2016). This is an absurd spread, but this makes the real insurance cost of the lifetime of electricity produced at the highly sophisticated Japanese nuclear plants calculated at between $0.22 and $5.78 per kilowatt-hour. Even the lower value is more than what most Americans pay for electricity. These values are far higher than the current insurance cost mandated by Japanese law of $0.01 per kilowatt-hour and even the total cost consumers pay for electricity in Japan. It wasn’t just the real economic cost of nuclear power that was being kept from the Japanese people, it was also the risk.

What were those risks? A major impetus for the explosion of open-source Geiger counter projects (Pearce, 2013) was to help people in Japan measure the levels of radiation in their everyday life after Fukushima. Official announcements of nuclear accidents are viewed as unreliable by much of the public in both Japan and the United States, primarily because of conflicts of interest. The government is going to have to pick up the bill for any disaster because it backstops the industry’s insurance. The government therefore has an incentive to downplay any disaster. During the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese Times reported that the Japanese public was extremely skeptical of official reports in part because government officials appeared to be actively preventing citizens from obtaining data (Brasor, 2012). Even in the United States, where we would hope that communication would be better, our government appeared reluctant to post online whatever levels it was monitoring as radiation from Fukushima hit the West Coast, and The Washington Post (2011) reported that its monitors crashed.

The response from citizen scientists in Japan was fast and furious. They crowdsourced Geiger counter radiation readings from across Japan using a collection of both open-source hardware and open-source software for the Japan Geigermap. This did not even need to be particularly complicated hardware hacking. There is already an Android app that can turn your cell phone into a tolerable radiation detector using the CMOS camera covered by a piece of tape (Benchoff, 2012). Even better, Softbank launched a smartphone that tracks radiation specifically for Japan that you can use in America as well. Crowdsourced radiation or pollution levels and similar kinds of activity may be the start of a movement to bring more people into science to act as a check on bad or dishonest sources of scientific information for the public (Pearce, 2012).

Do not be lulled into complacency and think this sort of thing could not happen in America. Consider my home state of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear accident from decades ago. There is now a figurative ton of evidence that the releases were underreported to the public by officials by, at the very least, a factor of 2, and maybe even by a factor of 1,000. The official U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) value is 10 MCi from the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (1979). A follow-up study more than doubled that to 22 MCi at minimum (Thompson et al., 1995), whereas a careful look at the sum of the nuclear releases yields 36 MCi and estimates anywhere between 100 and 1,000 times the reported value (Gundersen, 2009). Will we ever know the truth? Maybe not, because there was not a fleet of distributed citizen science–operated open-source Geiger counters around Pennsylvania at the time. The bottom line, however, perhaps comes from the medical community: A raft of epidemiological studies points to a significant epidemic of cancer that is clearly related to the Three Mile Island release (Gur et al., 1983; Hatch et al., 1990, 1991; Wing et al., 1997, 2000; Talbott et al., 2000a, 2000b). Simply put, if the NRC values were accurate, then the health impacts around Three Mile Island would have been a lot less. If you live anywhere near a nuclear power plant (see Figure 14.4), it might be worth looking into an open-source Geiger counter project. Numerous open-source projects are available, such as the PiGi with a Raspberry Pi, and the MicroGeiger, Seeedstudio, PocketMagic, and Sparkfun Geiger counters.

Figure 14.4 Map of the current 98 operating commercial nuclear reactors in the United States. Map compliments of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (Public domain) https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/map-power-reactors.html

How Companies Can Harness Open Source to Support Citizen Scientists

You can have too much of a good thing. Take nutrients, for instance. Nutrients can help your body grow or help crops on a farm to grow. Too much, however, can be poison. Consider nitrates and nitrites, which are used as fertilizers. When we treat sewage, fertilize crops, and have large animal farms, we end up with too many nutrients in virtually all waters of the Earth (Canfield and Glazer, 2010). According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 2015), among all environmental problems in America, excess nutrients in our water systems constitute probably the most costly, widespread, and difficult problem to solve. It is so bad that you can see the problem from space (Figure 14.5). At harmful levels, nitrate, the most oxidized form of nitrogen, is a threat to human and animal health, both directly and indirectly. Nitrates and nitrites in drinking water are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act and in wastewater by the Clean Water Act. These government regulations are meant to help protect us against harmful levels of nitrates and nitrites, which can result in methemoglobinemia, a deadly blood disorder. Usually it does not get that bad. More likely is nitrate pollution leading to harmful bacterial and algal growth in wells, lakes, and estuaries (Johnson and Harrison, 2015).

Is the water near you safe to drink? Swim in? Maybe you would like to see how much nitrate is running off a local farm into a nearby stream, river, or lake. Maybe you just want to know if you are putting too much fertilizer on your garden and you could save money by putting on less. You could think about flexing your citizen science muscles and measuring the nitrates yourself. But how?

Figure 14.5 On July 28, 2015, Landsat 8 captured an image of algal blooms in western Lake Erie. NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat. (public domain)

Among the certified methods to detect and quantify nitrates and nitrites is the cadmium reduction method (EPA Method 353.2), which is not what you want, because it requires using and disposing of cadmium, which is a toxic heavy metal. An alternative “green” method for nitrate and nitrite analysis is enzymatic reduction using nitrate reductase (Campbell et al., 2006; Patton and Kryskalla, 2013). This enzymatic nitrate analysis method has been verified to yield results that are equivalent to the accepted EPA-certified methods, but it demands the use of a spectrophotometer. You probably don’t have one sitting around the living room. In the old days, such systems were large, bulky, and found only in professional labs. They were also insanely expensive. If you really want to do lab-grade tests of nitrates yourself, what you want is an inexpensive portable photometer to help you detect nitrate pollution.

Luckily for you, the Nitrate Elimination Company (NECi) sponsored the development of an open-source photometer that radically undercut the cost of other methods to detect nitrates with the use of their enzymes (Wittbrodt et al., 2015). Why would the company do this? After all, NECi is primarily a biotech firm that manufactures enzymes. NECi designs enzymes that replace hazardous reagents used for water, soil, food, and fuel analyses. The company is really good at that, but it does not focus on selling tools. To make it easy on itself, NECi harnessed the power of the open-hardware community we talked about in Chapter 13 to make scientific tools. The photometric system the company designed is built on the work that my group had done on open-source colorimeters that could be used to test water quality by measuring chemical oxygen demand (COD) or biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) (Anzalone et al., 2013). This initial device was pretty crude and had to be plugged into a wall outlet (see Figure 14.6).

Figure 14.6 Michigan Tech University student measuring contaminated water for chemical oxygen demand (COD) with an open-source colorimeter. Contaminated water is a major issue in Michigan, but the tests are prohibitively expensive to deploy on a large scale. Here, the open-source device costs about $50 and can be built by students from well-documented plans. It replaces a proprietary device that sells for several thousand dollars. http://www.appropedia.org/Open-source_colorimeter

Subsequent suggestions from the community encouraged us to make a water testing device that could measure turbidity (how cloudy the water is) as well, so we did that next (Wijnen et al., 2014). This tool was then transformed, with the help of NECi, into a spectrophotometer that would work with any Android device to measure nitrates with a degree of accuracy formerly only possible with expensive bench-top equipment. If you are doing just one measurement, you can read it off the screen on your smartphone. If you are doing a major study, data are stored on your Android device and can be downloaded to spreadsheet programs such as Libre Calc or any agricultural software package.

Enzymes “find” their targets at low concentration in complex mixtures, giving you, the citizen scientist, better data with little effort. The reagents are safe for you and the environment. Technically, you could probably drink them (but this is not recommended). Volumes are small. The total assay takes place in 1 milliliter of solution. This creates less waste and fewer collected samples, which are important if you are teaming up with friends to do something like map a river’s pollution. Enzyme-based analysis paired with a photometer built around a conventional optical bench and powered by the “brain” of a smartphone running on Android software makes almost anyone capable of generating real, usable nitrate data in the palm of your hand (see Figure 14.7).

NECi now sells test kits based on these enzymes that enable anyone to acquire near-lab-quality results. By agreeing to release the designs of the tool under an open license (Pearce, 2018), the company encouraged new customers, like us citizen scientists, because its enzymes were necessary for the functioning of the device as designed. This invention effectively opened the market of lab-grade nitrate testing to the consumer and citizen scientist level, which had not been possible previously. Although the company had established customers in the agricultural industry, the device allowed the price point to be pushed down low enough to be used by small family-run farms and even home gardeners. NECi hopes that increased testing of community water can increase public interest in maintaining water quality. Valid data sets are useful for all interested parties, everyone from the government to your lawyer.

Figure 14.7 Open-source photometric system for testing nitrates with enzymes. Build instructions and bill of materials available at https://www.appropedia.org/Open-Source_Photometric_System_for_Enzymatic_Nitrate_Quantification

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