Cool Projects and Tools

The Snapshot Wisconsin Team recently attended the Citizen Science Association conference in St. Paul, MN where researchers and organizations were on hand to share the latest in citizen science. At the conference we learned about some really cool projects and tools that might interest educators and citizen scientists:

Citizen Science Projects

The National Phenology Network monitors the influence of climate on the phenology of plants, animals, and landscapes. Their Nature’s Notebook Education Program is designed to provide students with place-based, hands-on learning opportunities.

How does this spring compare to “normal”? Data from the National Phenology Network can tell us.

The Habitat Network provides tools to better understand urban wildlife habitat through mapping.  Habitat Network connects you with other individuals in your region and provides participants with resource on how to cultivate habitat.

CoCoRaHS is the community collaborative rain, hail, and snow network.  Members of the network work together to measure and map participation across the U.S.

Great Sunflower Project participants observe pollinators like this bumble bee.

Those interested in bees and butterflies can join the Great Sunflower Project and the Monarch Larvae Monitoring Project to help monitor how our flower loving insect friends are faring.

For volunteers in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Citizen Based Monitoring program maintains a list of citizen science projects that are active in Wisconsin.  Check out the calendar to see a list of upcoming citizen science events.

Tools

There are some great tools available to help collect data and learn about wildlife in the field. A few we learned about in St. Paul are the Echo Meter Touch device for recording bat echolocations, Song Meter for capturing wildlife sounds, and Song Sleuth for automatically identify singing birds. Ready to start a project that involves collecting wildlife sounds? You may be interested in this grant program to support bioacoustics research efforts.