Eurasian Nuthatch by Pieter Colpaert on ProjectNoah.org

For the past two years I’ve been working at one of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s citizen science projects, Celebrate Urban Birds, which largely relies on the Internet to disseminate information about birds and urban habitat, to reach new audiences, and to receive the daily data that participants provide by uploading their observations directly onto the CUBs website.

The CUBs science model involves thousands of 10-minute bird observations around North America, and many of them come to the Lab of Ornithology on pen and paper data forms that then have to be scanned in, so internet observations are preferred. Another citizen science project based out of Cornell that I’ve highlighted before, the Lost Ladybug Project, isn’t based on data forms, but on photographs of ladybugs found across the US, focusing in particular on the nine- and two-spotted ladybug. As I  mentioned in my brief post on the Lost Ladybug Project, one of the goals outlined in their National Science Foundation Project Summary is to create “one of the largest, most accurate, accessible biological databases ever developed.”  Continue reading →