Citizen scientists Ordinary people doing extraordinary work. For free. by Beverley Scobell

Citizen scientists

Ordinary people doing extraordinary work. For free

by Beverley Scobell

On a warm and sunny day last May, a team of volunteers met in a parking lot next to a bridge over Case Creek, a tributary of the Rock River near the Quad Cities airport. Mike, Mitch and Jim pulled on chest-high wading boots, checked their equipment and headed for the creek bottom, which was already overgrown with tall plants and vines, some of those poison ivy.

Mike and Mitch have been wading through this bottom for five years -- it's Jim's first year -- to survey the stream's health. They've given up four hours of one weekend in each of those years to gather data for RiverWatch, a Department of Natural Resources program that uses their surveys and information gathered by other volunteer teams to help professional scientists keep tabs on the status of the state's environment.

On last spring's outing, this trio of citizen scientists followed a RiverWatch instruction manual to the letter. After measuring water and air temperature, creek depth and flow, water appearance and odor, the team used nets and buckets provided by RiverWatch to scoop samples of rocks and other material from the creek's bottom and bank. Finding a level place on a sandbar, they spread their trays, tweezers and magnifying glasses to get ready to "count critters," or macroinvertebrates to biologists. When the sample was thoroughly gleened of all insect larvae (some barely visible to the naked eye) and other small creatures that live in streams, they transferred the collection to a jar of alcohol, which was later turned over to their RiverWatch field office.

"This is the fewest number and least diversity we've seen coming out of this creek," says Mike Diamond, an

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anthropologist who has worked in most of the nation's premier natural history museums and now teaches at the local college.

Mitch White, a civil and environmental engineer who runs his own hydroelectric plant and works as an environmental consultant, agrees. "It's been a steady decline each year," he adds.

But Jim King, a benthicecologist (someone who studies macroinvertebrates on the bottoms of rivers, lakes and oceans) was surprised to find so few animals in the sample. "Yet there is still life to be found," he says, noting though that siltation inhibits oxygen.

This degradation of stream life is just one piece of the environmental puzzle citizen scientists provide for professional scientists. And for the first time in this or any state's history, an assessment of Illinois' environmental health will include volunteer monitoring data, weighted equally with that of the natural resources department's scientists. Their report is due out this summer. The Quad Cities team's sample was added to hundreds of others collected from rivers and streams statewide and then entered into a database maintained by EcoWatch, the state organization that also coordinates ForestWatch, PrairieWatch, WetlandWatch and UrbanWatch.

Through those programs, more than 2,000 adults and 16,000 high school science students have helped monitor the state's environmental health since RiverWatch was launched in 1994, followed by ForestWatch in 1996 and a pilot WetlandWatch last year. PrairieWatch and UrbanWatch, a program aimed at monitoring plants and animals that live in city environments, are gearing up. SoilWatch, which will look at the health of agricultural soils, then other ecosystem soils, is still in the planning stages.

All of these programs, though, will get off the ground more slowly than expected because the General Assembly turned down Gov. George Ryan's request for permanent funding for EcoWatch. Ryan asked for $500,000 for the program in the natural resources department's 2001 budget beginning this month.

PrairieWatch, which will survey native grassland plants and animals, was to have started statewide this fall, but will be restricted to the northern region for now. WetlandWatch will be curtailed even more, says Dana Curtiss, coordinator for the EcoWatch network.

Though the RiverWatch trio might be called the Dream Team of Citizen Scientists, Mitch, Mike and Jim, like all the program's volunteers, spent six to eight hours in classroom preparation learning to identify their specific "indicator" species. (The decline or loss of these more fragile plants and animals is an early warning

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that an ecosystem is under threat.) They then spent a full day of field study guided by one of the 13 regional EcoWatch trainers.

For all volunteers, follow-up practice and review sessions are offered periodically. Trainers are available to answer questions and provide technical support. Further, the department provides equipment and a step-by-step procedure outlined in a monitoring manual. Citizen scientists also receive on-site help during their first monitoring season, and can attend supervised open-lab sessions to help them identify specimens and fill out data sheets.

Program requirements differ. ForestWatch volunteers, for instance, monitor their sites twice a year, a spring survey of ground cover and a fall survey of trees, shrubs and vines. During spring monitoring, those volunteers are asked to estimate how much of the ground is covered by plants and, using equipment provided by ForestWatch, measure tree canopy height as well as observe downed woody debris and signs of human use or disturbance. In the fall, they identify and measure the diameter of trees, survey the shrub layer and monitor the density of the tree canopy foliage. They are to take note of the presence of gypsy moths and dogwood anthracnose, a fungal disease that kills dogwood trees. And they are asked to look for such regional exotic species as the Asian long-horned beetle.

The need for volunteer help in monitoring the state's environment was spotlighted by professional scientists who completed the first comprehensive assessment of Illinois' environment in 1992. In a 1994 report, they warned that the condition of the state's natural ecosystems is rapidly declining. They concluded the decline is due to fragmentation of habitats, a result of farming and other development, pollution and the spread of exotic species that crowd out native plants and animals.

They also concluded that, despite amassing one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of environmental data anywhere in the world, there were still too many gaps in knowledge to accurately assess trends in the health of the state's ecosystem. For example, the exact impact of barge traffic on river ecosystems is not well understood. Nor is the amount of fertilizers and pesticides applied to croplands or to urban areas known.

In short, researchers would need an "army of biologists" to survey all the areas that should be monitored. So they got that army by enlisting the help of such volunteers as Mitch, Mike and Jim. As a result, they've been able to cover more ground.

The state's biologists conduct detailed biodiversity surveys on 30 randomly selected sites in each of the four ecosystem types (forest, stream, grassland and wetland), which results in 150 sites being monitored for each habitat once every five years. Citizen scientists, on the other hand, collect data from nearly 500 sites each year.

And the data is solid. In the first year of a three-year comparative analysis, Ed DeWalt, an aquatic entomologist, found that data collected by RiverWatch volunteers was close to that of natural resources department scientists. "In many cases the data was interchangeable," says Curtiss of EcoWatch.

Still, the state verifies that data on three levels. Citizen scientist data sheets are reviewed for completeness and accuracy by group leaders and again by EcoWatch trainers. Next, all data are entered through an online system that includes automated quality control checks. Finally, about one-third of all citizen scientists are randomly selected to submit macroinvertebrate specimens (what they put in the jars of alcohol at the stream site) or leaf collections for accuracy checks by staff scientists.

As an extra check, EcoWatch trainers conduct "shadow studies." They go to a site that has been monitored by volunteers and replicate the data collection using the same procedures. State scientists then compare their data to that collected by the volunteers. To date, the results are encouraging. Accuracy rates of citizen scientist data exceed 80 percent. One-half of RiverWatch data exceeds 90 percent. Other comparison studies have confirmed high levels of precision and correlation between citizen scientist and EcoWatch scientist data.

That's surprising, given that citizen scientists begin the program with such different levels of expertise. "Our volunteers range from people trained in the natural sciences to those who haven't had a science course since high school. They are teachers, business owners, homemakers, hourly workers and retirees," says Curtiss.

What all the volunteers have in common, she says, is an interest in the outdoors, a hunger for information and a willingness to get involved in local issues that affect their quality of life.

Whatever their background, citizen scientists bring qualities to the program that allow the state's professional scientists to trust the data they collect. "Illinois is leading the nation with its citizen scientist program," says Curtiss. "This is not on the fringe. This is mainstream biological data collection."

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Sam S. Manivong, Illinois Periodicals Online Coordinator