Author name: Matthew T. Dearing

The dog days of summer are essentially over, and what a beautiful time it is to be in New York City. So, what better way to enjoy a cool evening in the City than to help scientists monitor cricket and katydid populations using your wandering eyes and ears!

The Discover Life organization is hosting this wonderful citizen science research event, and they are inviting everyone in the City to “an aural expedition and a celebration of life in the leafy jungles of urban and suburban NYC and surrounding area.”

The monitoring event will be held on September 11, 2009 (or the next day, if it rains), and if you are interested in joining you may register online. They will be publishing a live map online of the collected results, so it will still be an interesting event to watch even if you live too far away to participate.

The task is easy… just take a stroll at night, listen for one minute, and write down the kinds of chirping insects you hear.

For those of you United States citizens braving the wild northern hinterlands of Alaska, there is a new program for organizing citizen scientists through the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Conservations Division.

This great partnership between the interested public and local professionals is a great opportunity for doing some particularly unique amateur research that would be entirely different from anything that the rest of the “lower states” can imagine.

Currently, the program is featuring projects on the habitats of wood frogs (and, how in the world do they survive the Alaskan winter!), the conservation of waterbird populations, and the study of the summertime habitat for the Alaskan bat (did you not think Alaska had any bats?).

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is now offering a new program to train state-wide citizen scientists with background knowledge to empower them to be more effective volunteer naturalists. The goal of the Nebraska Master Naturalist Program is to create a network of trained volunteers to focus on habitat conservation, environmental education, citizen science, outdoor skills and ecotourism.

If you live in Nebraska and are interested in joining this exciting new citizen science training program, link through below and contact the group today. Be sure to post your experiences back here on DPR Citizen Science!