myScience: How the Public Can Join USGS Science Projects

Citizen volunteers working with USGS scientists at a river. USGS.

myScience (txpub.usgs.gov/myscience) is a web application from the U.S. Geological Survey's Texas Water Science Center, built with the USGS Community for Data Integration, to make more people aware of USGS citizen science projects and get them involved. It lists 20 projects open to the public, covering every USGS mission area. From the USGS education site (education.usgs.gov), a visitor follows the Citizen Science link, searches by topic or place, picks a project and presses "Get Involved". Inside the USGS, an internal version helps scientists who run or want to run crowdsourcing projects share what they know.

An example: invasive species

Public help benefits research from biodiversity and landslides to water and mapping. One example is invasive species, those not native to an area and able to harm it. Freed from the predators and other checks of their home ranges, they often spread fast and cause steep declines in native species and large economic and health costs.

Through myScience, volunteers can report sightings to the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Online Sighting Report System, building a central, mapped and verified record of non-native aquatic species in the United States. Databases for particular species are growing, such as the one for the highly invasive zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), which has spread to several north Texas lakes since the state's first confirmed sighting in 2009.

A long tradition

Volunteers first joined USGS data collection more than 120 years ago, recording stream gage heights as far back as the late 1800s.

• The North American Bird Phenology Program's volunteers filled out 6 million paper cards recording bird sightings from 1880 to 1970; as of August 2015, a worldwide crowd of volunteers had transcribed more than 1 million of them.
• Paper has largely given way to online programmes such as Nature's Notebook, which tracks the seasonal cycles of plants and animals with many private and federal partners, the USGS among them. Since its data site launched in 2009, observers have contributed about 5 million records at more than 15,000 sites nationwide, building long-term datasets for research.

Compared with networks built by one scientist or a small team, citizen science and crowdsourcing reach more places, in finer detail, over longer periods, at lower cost, and promote science, technology and maths education along the way.

Sources

• Sally Holl, myScience—Engaging the public in U.S. Geological Survey science, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2015–3070. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/fs20153070