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Iowa State wants to train ‘citizen scientists’

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By Alma Gaul | Thursday, May 8, 2008 10:38 PM CDT | () comments

Do you like nature?

Would you like to help collect data out in the woods or wetlands that could be used in the future to make land-use decisions affecting wildlife?

Iowa State University Extension sponsors a program called NatureMapping that trains volunteers to be “citizen scientists” by making wildlife population counts, and the next session is Saturday at the Wapsi River Environmental Education Center, Dixon, Iowa.

Jason O’Brien, who oversees the program statewide, is hoping to recruit people from the Quad-City region, which he says is greatly under-represented.

At present, there is just one person who regularly collects data in Scott County, a woman who has been counting frogs in Davenport’s Nahant Marsh for 10 years, he said.

Data collecting is open-ended; volunteers can pick their own spots to monitor, can do their counts as often as they want and can even pick the kind of wildlife they feel confident counting, including amphibians, reptiles, mammals or birds, he said.

All observations are entered into the Iowa NatureMapping database.

Ideally, monitoring would be done at the same spot at regular intervals, such as monthly, seasonally or yearly. It could be done on one’s own land, or while hiking or canoeing.

The reason for the program is that “there are not enough professionals, time or funding” to do wildlife inventories of the entire country, said Jim Pease, an Extension wildlife specialist at Iowa State.

“It gives us a better understanding of what’s out there,” O’Brien said of the data collecting. “The more we know, the better we can manage land for the greater good. Wildlife is often the last thing considered in land-management decisions.”

The hope is to “keep common wildlife common,” he added.

But there is a second goal as well, which is simply to educate people about wildlife and increase the knowledge base of a population that is increasingly disconnected from nature.

“Both data and education are key; neither would be worth doing alone,” O’Brien said.

The NatureMapping program was developed in 1993 in the state of Washington and was adopted in Iowa in 1999. Since then, 1,100 people have been trained, and 70 percent of the data they have collected came from private lands.

Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.

TO SIGN UP

NatureMapping training is 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Wapsi River Environmental Education Center, 31555 52nd Ave., Dixon, Iowa.

The cost is $30, including lunch and materials. To register, call Jason O’Brien at Iowa State University, (515) 294-6440, or go to the Web site, extension.iastate.edu/naturemapping.

The instructor is Dave Murcia of the Scott County Conservation Board.