Newsletter #7: April 19, 2012

Your Research Missions this week are focused deep underground (to explore earthquakes), at the Earth’s surface (to explore plants and animals in your yard), and up in the sky (to explore bird migrations). These are some of the citizen science missions featured at DiscoverMagazine.com. Your Research Mission is presented by SciStarter and Discover Magazine.

Calling all researchers and science team leaders! Are you looking for citizen science volunteers to help with research? SciStarter seeks to bring projects and people together. If you’d like your project featured, submit it to the SciStarter Project Finder for consideration by the editors. And this summer, consider attending and presenting at the Public Participation in Scientific Research Conference in Portland, Oregon to share insights across projects and fields of study with researchers and practitioners involved with citizen science.

Recently on the SciStarter Blog, Kate Atkins reviewed mobile Apps that are really for the birds. Or, rather, they are for birders, at least birders with smartphones. This post is a part of the “Citizen Science Test Drive” series, first-person reviews of citizen science apps, tools and platforms. Meet Kate and other SciStarter team members this Saturday at the Philadelphia Science Festival and Tuesday at Philly Tech Week! Learn more here.

Do you have a favorite App for citizen science? If so, tell us about it. To contribute to this series and share your experiences with our community, email Dr. John Ohab, Director of Community Engagement: john@scistarter.com.



- The SciStarter Team

Big Cheer for Science

Shake it up! Big Cheer for Science

Join the Big Cheer for Science on April 27, 2012 at 1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (10:30 am Pacific Time). Ten thousand students, plus scientists and engineers who happen to be cheerleaders will be doing the Big Cheer together in Washington DC. Students at schools around the country will be participating and recording how much the ground shakes during the Big Cheer.



YardMap

Take a break from yardwork and map your yard.

The new YardMap network, an easy-to-use online mapping tool, allows citizen scientists to consider the types of outdoor spaces (big or small) can be home to birds and other wildlife. Connect with other YardMappers, solve problems, share maps and good ideas all while helping to build an invaluable database of habitat data for Cornell Lab of Ornithology scientists. Don’t have a yard? No problem. Stick any address into the YardMap tool and you can map your schoolyard, park, or even the White House lawn.



The North American Bird Phenology Program

√   Birds

Calling all bird historians!

Sitting on yellowing old paper are handwritten notes of six million birds observed in North America over many decades. The North American Bird Phenology Program is asking the public to help them make the old paper records from 1880-1970 into useful modern data about bird migrations by transcribing the information from scans into a database. All you’ll need to participate is a computer with Internet access.