Citizen Science: Amateur Ain’t a Dirty Word (by )
Or: Progress Is Hard (and Messy)
And: Everything You Wanted to Know About Mycoflora Projects but Never Cared Enough to Ask (EYWKAMPNCEA).
on the right: A very far eastern Dendrocollybia… Read on for details.
*With a title containing the terms “Amateur” and “hard and messy”, this post better get some traffic…*
So! There’s been a lot of trollish, flamey, someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet-style discussions over at Mushroom Observer recently, and despite the entertainment value, I thought a blog post might help quell the animosity and clear up some of the common outstanding questions and misconceptions under discussion.
The discussions revolve around Citizen Science and the associated questions: How does it work? Is it really science? Am I a citizen scientist? If so, is there a cure?
Basically, I came to realize that many folks aren’t sure what citizen science is, how it works, or how it should be done. So to begin with, I’ll just say that I use the definition below.
Citizen scientists = anyone who doesn’t have a degree related to their natural history interests and/or doesn’t work in that field as an academic (professor, researcher, or field worker) or in the private sector (whether as researcher, technician or field biologist).
(wikipedia definition of Citizen Science here).
Given these definitions, here’s the context in which these discussions are situated, and a summary of what’s at stake:
The North American Mycoflora Project got its act together (ie. gave itself a name) in the past handful of years. The goal of the NAMP (as I’ll call it) are:
1) Compile a list of each and every macrofungal species in North America.
2) Get a good general sense of where those species grow and when they fruit.
3) Photograph them and get voucher specimens (dried mushrooms stored in a museum).
This is (if it’s not immediately apparent) a huge, Herculean, Sisyphean, Just-give-up-now-ean undertaking. We have no real estimate of how many mushrooms grow in North America, but the order of magnitude is likely in the high tens/low hundreds -of-thousands. Their taxonomy is unsettled, their identification often extremely difficult, and many are not easy or predictable to find.
But! It’s something folks think is worth doing, and lots of people have an interest in seeing it through. Suffice to say it’s happening.
These are some of the nerds responsible for making it happen.
My first contention is that professional scientists (mostly researchers at universities) stand no chance of doing this by themselves. Too many mushrooms, too enormous an area, and too many other responsibilities spreading their time thin. It is a mostly uncontested fact that the large majority of the work will be done by people who search for, identify, document and preserve mushrooms simply because they love them. They could be called “hobbyists”, but for our purposes, we’ll call them citizen scientists.
But it turns out that when you solicit data from such a demographic, you get back data of widely varying quality. At one end of the spectrum you have knowledgeable folks like Ron Pastorino who are just the bee’s knees in terms of data quality, and at the other end you have the waynegrompskys of the world. In short, you end up dealing with what scientists call a “noisy” data set. Much of the data is incorrect, much of it is partially incorrect, much of it is correct but incomplete, much of it is correct given current understanding but not verifiable, etc.
What folks need to understand is that THIS IS NORMAL.
The study of every group of organisms from birds to insects to mammals has experienced these growing pains. The most important first step in generating a mycoflora is to gather as much data as possible, and secondly, to have a good system of filters in place to sort through it.
I spent a few days with Carol and C.J. Ralph this past fall while I was in Humboldt giving a mushroom lecture - they’re heroes of the bird observatory scene in the Pacific Northwest, and C.J. is heavily involved in eBird (the most successful citizen-science project ever). While we were discussing the difficulties that mycofloristic projects face, C.J. used a metaphor that stuck with me; something to the effect of “Set the gates wide, but make the doorway narrow”.