Wildlife monitoring at Glacier National Park in Montana is the daunting responsibility of two biologists, little funding, a whole lot of ground to cover, and hundreds of species to track.

Over the past couple of summers, local volunteers have been trained to travel deep into the backwoods of the park and monitor population levels of animals that are of serious concern. The data collection has been tremedous, and would have otherwise been impossible to organize without the army of amateurs dedicated to supporting the park.

Through the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center  at the park, additional training sessions will be available in July for those interested in participating. Call 406.888.7986 for more information.

"Citizen Scientists to the Rescue for Glacier Park" :: Flathead Beacon :: June 26, 2008 :: [ READ ]

[ VIEW ] Live Webcams at Glacier National Park

Join with the New Jersey Audubon Society this summer and fall in the Raritan Bay and Raritan River watershed area and the Meadowlands to track and survey snowy and great egrets, great blue herons, yellow-crowned night herons and black-crowned night herons in the region.

APP.com "Volunteers sought to track egrets, herons in New Jersey" :: June 25, 2008 :: [ READ more about this opportunity ]

Congratulations to Steve Mandel of Soquel, California who won the 2008 Amateur Achievement Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific! Starting his project in 2004, Steve worked to catalog images of nebulae in the Milky Way. A significant experimental discovery was that small-aperture telescopes with CCD cameras--something available to any amateur astronomer--is a perfect recording device to detect large nebular clouds high above the galactic plane.

[Learn more about the Mandel-Wilson Unexplored Nebulae Project]

[ READ more about the ASP 2008 Awards ]

As featured on BBC News - Science/Nature and found by DPRI via Astronomy Blog, check out how an amateur astronomer discovered a new electrical storm on Saturn.

[READ]

Since major damage from Hurricane Katrina, the new Pascagoula River Audubon Center is growing with great new opportunities for learning about the local habitats and helping to redevelop the landscape. Get involved soon if you live in the area.

"Nature grows on Moss Point" SunHerald.com :: June 24, 2008 :: [READ]

Beginning June 28, 2008 in Old Town, Maine, A new group at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension is being formed to train volunteers to howl like a gray wolf in the deep woods of Maine. These wolves--which are federally protected--are believed to no longer live in this area of the country.

Learn more about the Wolf Inquiry Project

Our thoughts and prayers will be with the brave citizen scientists that if a wolf is lured out of hiding that it isn't romantically attracted to the howler.

"Are there any wolves in Maine?"
Kennebec Journal Morning Sentinel June 23, 2008 [READ]

A report on a large Bee-Keeper group could be easily set up by anyone interested in this nature hobby.

East Bay hub for bee hobbyists' hives :: Contra Costa Times June 19, 2008 [read]

Help observe at track Loons, which are under threat in Montana and Alberta, Canada.

Citizen science no loonie idea :: The Waterton Boundary June 13, 2008 [read]

This is real amateur science making real discoveries. Galaxy Zoo allows citizen scientists to help identify and classify astronomical objects in a way that is surprisingly much more efficient that a computer program. (This is featured as a DPRI eLab.) Read about this new discovery that has excited astrophysicists from around the world...

Talk on your new iPhone, let the government track your every move, and help support social science research. Maybe Steve Jobs and the US Government can give us a subsidized phones to help with any potential projects .

GPS-Equipped iPhone Could Enable New Citizen Science :: Wired Science June 09, 2008 [read]

Seriously, though, there certainly could be interesting projects to set up with GPS tracking and social movement, clustering, and other measurements of self-organizing masses of people.