Citizen Science Center

A Queen snake. Slightly harder to love than your average polar bear cub. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The snake really needs a better publicist.

It’s easy to get a person worked up about saving cute panda bears, cheeky dolphins, or tough little butterflies, but mention snakes, and you’re more likely to see that same person reach for a heavy shovel. Yet snakes are vital predators in many ecosystems around the world, and are just as much in need of conservation as the cuddly critters.

That’s why the Center for Snake Conservation (CSC) is holding a snake count from May 12-20 this year (and again from September 15-23). The goal is to document all the species of snakes currently in the United States in a specific time window. The data collected will be used by the CSC to map the current distribution of snakes.

The site provides suggestions on what to include in your snake counting tool kit, and of course, safety tips if you live in an area where the snake population is venomous (hint: don’t try to catch them). If you think you’re up for a bit of serpentine adventure, here’s where you can register.

A "chimney" structure (Credit: Pavilion Lake Research Project/Donnie Reed)

British Columbia, Canada is famous for its freshwater lakes, and two in particular are proving to be of particular interest to scientists interested in learning about life on other planets.

Pavilion Lake and Kelly Lake, located about 250 kilometers from Vancouver, are full of microbialites: carbonate structures that form in water with the help of microorganisms. Most current examples of microbialites are found in harsh environments that don’t support other life forms; all other microbialites studied so far are in fossil form. These lakes are not only non-extreme environments that provide excellent research opportunities, they have an amazing diversity of microbialite structures.

Learning more about the microbialites in these lakes will teach us more about the biogeochemical processes that were active during Earth’s early history and potentially on other planets such as Mars. The lakes are also Mars analogues in another way: exploring them requires specialized equipment and life support systems. Scientists are using a combination of human explorers and robotic equipment to gather data (e.g., SCUBA, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and submersibles).

The GetMapper project is where you come in. Researchers need your help in tagging the many photos they have of the lake bottoms. All you need to do is register for an account, take a quick tutorial, and then choose the tags that best describe what you’re seeing. The site is thoroughly gamified, and you can compete, earn points and unlock achievement badges based on your work. You’ll be in good company: since the project opened, more than 1 million photos have been tagged.

Photograph of a female Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) on a hybrid Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa en x Asclepias incarnata). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you had to pick a symbol to represent toughness, you could do worse than pick the Monarch butterfly. These fragile creatures migrate from Canada all the way down to Baja, California, or to Mexico in the winter, and then back north again in the summer.

Monarch populations are in decline, however, mainly due to a loss of habitat. Their favourite food is milkweed, and the milkweed has fallen victim to urban development, herbicides containing glyphosate (most notably Roundup®), and roadside management.

MonarchWatch is an organization dedicated to restoring Monarch butterfly populations and you can help, especially if you live along the migratory pathways of the butterfly. Your first option is to create a Monarch waystation. This is a garden that contains three varieties of milkweed, and several nectar plants. You can order a kit that comes with all the seeds you need, as well as detailed instructions for planting. If you already have readily available milkweed in your area, you might try a Monarch rearing kit, which allows you to actually raise Monarchs from the larval stage.

And of course, if these options are a bit beyond your gardening or naturalist abilities, you can always simply donate to the project or buy a t-shirt.

The BOINC logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By far the easiest way to get involved with a citizen science project is to let your computer do all the work: sign up for a so-called distributed computing project, install and configure some software, and voila! You’re contributing valuable CPU time to an important cause, and you don’t even have to break a sweat.

Today, I’m going to talk a bit about the concept of distributed computing, why it’s important, and then I’ll point you to one of the major platforms being used to do distributed computing.

Prior to the advent of distributed computing, researchers with big projects requiring a lot of computer power had to try to score time on their university’s super computer. As you might imagine, competition for a time slot was fierce: there were lots of problems requiring lots of computer cycles, and resources were limited. You could wait weeks or months for a slot that might or might not be long enough to accomplish your project goals, and heaven forbid something should go wrong with the system in the meantime, as that would mean further delays.

Then along came the rise of personal computing. While home computers certainly aren’t super computers, they are reasonably powerful, and more to the point, unless the user is actively playing an intensive PC game or rendering 3d movies, the CPU is actually idle most of the time. Someone lit upon the idea of harnessing all of those idle CPU cycles, and “distributed computing” was born.

The concept is this: break up a very large project into millions of smaller tasks, and then hand off those tasks to thousands of computers.You still need a decent server to communicate with all the remote devices, and a robust software program to coordinate all of those tasks, but both of these were cheaper to implement than additional super computer time.

The most popular distributed computing platform is called BOINC. The short form stands for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, and it was originally developed to support the SETI@home project (a program designed to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence). First started in 2002, the platform currently has more than 295,000 volunteers running the program on just under 1 million computers. That might sound like a lot, and indeed it provides projects with a fairly spectacular amount of computational power. However, it’s really only scratching the surface of what’s available. Think of it: how many computers do you have in your home alone? How many are in your office?

BOINC currently supports just over 40 projects, which I’ll cover in separate posts. But you don’t have to wait for me… go ahead and check out the software and see if there’s something you’d like to help out!

The Breakout Labs home page

Unless you’re well-versed in the Internet startup scene, the name Peter Thiel might not be known to you, but his ventures are almost certainly familiar. He was a co-founder of PayPal, an online payment company, and an investor in Facebook, Zynga, Spotify, and Yelp. He’s also behind the Thiel 20 Under 20 Fellowship.

One of his most recent projects is Breakout Labs, a funding organization designed to help groundbreaking research by independent researchers or early stage companies and allow them to test their “most radical ideas.” The organization wants to bridge the gap between traditional venture capital funding (which typically requires quick-to-market ideas) and government funding (which favours incremental approaches). The grants are anywhere between $50,000 and $350,000 depending on the project.

To apply, check out the eligibility requirements and fill out the submission form.  Your approach will have to be consistent with the Breakout Labs mission, of course, but if you’re doing something interesting, you might have a good chance. Good luck!