Natural Sciences 191CNS77 - FYS- Crowdsourcing Nature

How can we educate society about the natural world, contribute to important scientific studies, and help conserve threatened species? Citizen science! We will work together to collect real, useable ecological data from the field and join an international community of citizen scientists. You will take part in different citizen science ecology projects happening around the world, such as iNaturalist, eBird, and Notes from Nature. We will also discuss how citizen science projects can be used as educational and outreach tools, how crowdsourced data is used to conduct breakthrough research and conservation, and how to understand new scientific findings. With our powers combined, we will become citizen scientists!

Open to Natural Sciences Freshman with a declared major or on the Natural Sciences Exploratory Track.