Champions of Change Blog

Citizen Scientists and Monarch Butterflies

Karen Oberhauser is being honored as a Champion of Change for her dedication to increasing public engagement in science and science literacy.

When I think of citizen science, I think of points of enlightenment spreading over a map, literally filling it with new knowledge. Each point represents a person who is making an important contribution to science, who is learning a lot, and who is likely to be engaged in conserving the phenomenon they’re studying.

I founded and direct the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project (MLMP, www.mlmp.org), one of several citizen science projects focused on monarch butterflies. This 16-year-old project engages participants in collecting data that help us document monarch distribution and abundance in North America. The intense efforts of MLMP volunteers exemplify a term coined by Ralph Hames, who described volunteers in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Birds in Forested Landscapes project as “super citizen scientists.” MLMP volunteers assess monarch density for up to 15 weeks per year (or more in the southern US) using a protocol that can take more than an hour per week. They observe up to several hundred monarch host plants (milkweeds), often collect eggs and caterpillars to rear for a parasite study, and record data on flowering plants at their site. While it’s an honor to know that hundreds of people are donating so much time to this work, it brings with it great responsibility. I am keenly aware of the incredible value of these “donated data”, and the hours contributed by citizen scientists, often in lovely settings, but often too in hot weather, sometimes surrounded by mosquitoes, wood ticks, or poison ivy. My responsibility to MLMP volunteers is to help ensure that the scientific, educational, and conservation potential of their data is realized.

From a scientific perspective, citizen science provides an efficient way to increase the geographic scale of data collection, while at the same time providing fine-scale data, often literally from people’s back yards. Because citizen science projects often involve sampling locations across a wide range of environmental variation, they can answer questions that can’t be addressed by traditional university or public-agency research groups. And their data are being used. In a preliminary analysis of the published literature on monarch butterflies, my colleague Leslie Ries at the University of Maryland found that almost 100% of the papers published since 1990 on monarch population dynamics, 50% of the papers on monarch migration and movement, and 10% of the papers on natural enemies used citizen science data. One of those natural enemies papers was based on questions asked by MLMP volunteer Ilse Gebhard in Michigan, who, along with fellow volunteers (and paper co-authors) Charlie Cameron in North Carolina and Suzanne Oberhauser in Wisconsin, has raised thousands of monarch caterpillars to document parasitism by a particularly interesting parasitoid fly named Lespisia archippivora. That’s the power of citizen science.

We know that citizen science has major educational benefits. Citizen scientists increase their understanding of science concepts, their engagement and interest in research, and their science-related skills. My University of Minnesota Extension colleagues and I are working on a project called Driven to Discover, using citizen science programs focused on birds and monarchs as springboards for youth research. Through Driven to Discover, adult leaders and youth teams from Minnesota, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Ohio are engaged in exciting research, helping us build a model that will lead the field of citizen science in exciting new directions. Driven to Discover participant Josh Proehl built on his work on the MLMP and another monarch citizen science project (Project Monarch Health) to conduct independent research on a monarch disease called Ophryocystis elecktrochirra, or OE for short. This was the summer after he was in 5th grade, and his main tools were a forceps, scotch tape, and a microscope that his teacher Laura Molenaar borrowed from the local High School in New London, Minnesota. The next summer, he attended an international meeting of monarch biologists and citizen scientists, where I introduced him to the world’s expert on OE and director of Project Monarch Health, Dr. Sonia Altizer from the University of Georgia. Sonia and Josh talked as colleagues about the effects and transmission of this disease. The next summer, Josh enlisted his little sister Jenna in his research, and they continued to study OE. That’s the power of citizen science.

I’ve called citizen scientists an “army for conservation” for many reasons; they collect data with conservation applications; they often become stewards for local habitats; and they reach out to others about the importance of conservation. It’s imperative that citizen science doesn’t become just another tool for documenting the demise of the natural world. It can be profoundly depressing to document how bird, butterfly, and native plant populations are declining in the face of human impacts. But, only by understanding these changes and their causes do we have any chance of addressing them. On large scales, we use citizen science data to make decisions about what habitats to protect and how to best restore habitats that support biodiversity. Citizen scientists, whose work has led to strong connections with the natural world, urge our elected leaders to protect land, reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are leading to a changing climate, and address the onslaught of invasive species that are out-competing, consuming, and causing diseases in native species. On smaller, but extremely important scales, citizen scientists work to preserve monarchs and their habitat; MLMP volunteers have changed the location of planned parking lots that would destroy the milkweed patch they’ve been studying, planted host plants for monarchs in their gardens and between their farm fields, and created natural habitat in locations ranging from schoolyards to corporate centers to local parks.

Aldo Leopold once said: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.” Citizen science not only makes these wounds visible to many more people, but it can help to heal them. That is the power of citizen science.

Karen Oberhauser is a Professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota

BioCurious – a Hackerspace for Biology!

Eri Gentry is being honored as a Champion of Change for her dedication to increasing public engagement in science and science literacy.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is how to become involved in science as a non-scientist. When I was little, I wanted to be a scientist. The evidence? A self-portrait done by a seven year-old me in an array of colored pencil: me in a lab coat and enormous, round glasses, with the word SCIENTIST, in deliberate seven year-old caps, underneath.

When I was 11, officially middle-school age, I wanted to be a stockbroker, a writer, an inventor, and an actress. Oh yeah, a scientist, too. I grew up in what I call a “small, poor, prison town in the middle of the desert.” It’s the kind of place that doesn’t always put opportunities in front of you, but it’s also the kind of place that lets you run wild with dreams.

In college, I remember choosing Economics over Biology as a major because “I wanted to be social.” Along the way, I had gotten the now funny impression that scientists worked alone, in dark places, from the only scientist I’d met in my life – a high school Physics teacher who started the first class by telling us she was there to teach underprivileged kids.

Shortly after entering the working world, where I no longer had access to classes, labs, or professors, I realized I wanted to do science, not finance. The problem was that there was essentially no way for me to do that. I eventually found a small, non-profit biotech lab, SENS, that took me in as a volunteer. At SENS, scientists were working around the clock with a passion and intensity I had never before seen to cure diseases of aging – to save people’s lives. I may not have known how I could help, but I knew this was the place I wanted to be. The place where I was fulfilled.

Through volunteering, I ended up cofounding a non-profit cancer research lab, Livly, with the Director of Research at SENS, after a colleague of ours died from esophageal cancer, unable to even try an experimental treatment in the states. We worked on improving the metrics around the experimental treatment he might have gotten in the only place we could afford: our Mountain View, CA garage, an amalgam of self-built tools and equipment bought on eBay and scavenged at big pharma liquidation sales.

Not content with working alone in our garage, I started holding DIYbio-themed meetups at my house in 2009, which anyone with any interest whatsoever in science could attend. Chemists, artist, software developers, tech entrepreneurs, and even some original Homebrew Computer Club members attended the meetups, and they quickly grew out of our house and into the local hackerspace, Hacker Dojo, which allowed community members to hold events in their large space.

Talking to the folks who attended my meetups, I found that they, too, had discovered a passion for science later in life and didn’t know how to get pursue it without giving up their jobs and/or negatively impacting their families. Their needs were almost always the same: they needed access to equipment, a place to work, more education, and people. When I thought of how to fill their needs, Hacker Dojo came to mind, a place people congregated to work, to socialize, to “meet cofounders of companies they didn’t even know they wanted to start,” as Founding Director, David Weekly puts it.

A hackerspace devoted to biology had never been attempted before, but wasn’t that likely because people stopped getting exposed to science outside of academia? What if the former could help fix the latter, I wondered. The climate is right: tools are inexpensive (enough), people are interested in DIY science, and a modification of the hackerspace model would work to fill people’s needs. It all made sense, and it felt like a mission that had to be accomplished, so I joined forces with five “biohacker” friends to start BioCurious, the world’s first hackerspace for biology. 

We used the then brand-new Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to raise money and, with hundreds of backers from around the world, and hundreds more meetup members, we opened a 2600 square foot laboratory in Sunnyvale, CA that is open 7 days a week and lets anyone, at any level join for $100 a month. We have biotech classes, community projects, public science safety classes, glowing algae, scrappy entrepreneurs, and six year-old geneticists.  BioCurious is completely volunteer-run and member supported. Many said it wouldn’t work. It doesn’t simply work – it thrives. Innovative strategies for science are ideated and attempted every day, and it wouldn’t be possible without a community lab to serve as stepping-stone between academia and home life. We may be the first hackerspace for biology, but that’s just the beginning. People write to BioCurious from around the globe asking for advice on how to start their own biohackerspaces. It makes me wonder, what would the world look like with a community lab in every neighborhood?

Eri Gentry is the Founding President of BioCurious and past CEO of Livly.