#citizenscientist — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #citizenscientist, aggregated by home.social.
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As a few folks have pointed out, this post is filled with inaccuracies. Please read the replies in the thread!
From "This Day in History" on FB:
"She left civilization to live in the forest with a lynx, a wild boar, and a thieving crow. Scientists called her crazy. She proved them wrong.
In 1975, a young Polish scientist named #SimonaKossak made a decision that baffled everyone who knew her.
She had a doctorate. She had credentials. She came from one of Poland's most prestigious artistic families—her grandfather was Wojciech Kossak, the legendary painter whose work hung in museums.
She could have had a comfortable university position. A modern apartment in Warsaw. A conventional career studying nature from a safe distance.
Instead, Simona packed a single bag and walked into the #bialowiezaforest . And she stayed there for thirty years.Białowieża is no ordinary forest. It's the last remaining fragment of the primeval wilderness that once covered all of Europe—ancient, untouched, older than recorded history. Trees there grow so tall they seem to hold up the sky. Wolves still howl at night. European bison, extinct almost everywhere else, roam freely. It's the kind of place where you can still hear what the world sounded like before humans started building cities.
Simona found a small wooden cabin deep in the forest's heart. No electricity. No running water. No neighbors for miles.
Just trees. Silence. And the wild things.
Most people would have lasted a week.Simona lasted decades.
But she wasn't alone.
She shared her bed with a lynx named Żabka. Not a pet—lynxes can't be pets. But Żabka had been orphaned as a cub, and Simona raised her. The massive cat would curl up beside her at night, purring like distant thunder.
She rescued a wild boar named Żabka who followed her through the forest like a devoted dog, grunting softly when she spoke.
And then there was Korasek. Korasek was a crow—but not just any crow. He was brilliant, mischievous, and absolutely devoted to chaos. He'd dive-bomb cyclists riding through the forest, steal shiny objects from tourists' pockets, and bring Simona "gifts": coins, buttons, pieces of foil.
He'd sit on her shoulder while she worked, cawing commentary on everything she did.
The locals whispered that Simona was a witch. How else could you explain it? Animals followed her. Birds landed on her outstretched hand. Deer approached without fear.
She spoke to them, and somehow, impossibly, they seemed to understand.
But Simona wasn't casting spells.
She was listening.Most people walk through nature talking, making noise, asserting their presence. Simona did the opposite. She learned to move quietly, to observe patiently, to let the forest teach her its rhythms.
She studied animal behavior not from textbooks, but by living among them. She documented species that had never been properly observed. She proved that wild animals weren't just instinct-driven automatons—they had personalities, emotions, complex social structures.
Her research changed how scientists understood wildlife.But her most important work wasn't in journals.
It was in the forest itself.
Because while Simona was studying nature, others were trying to destroy it.
#LoggingCompanies wanted to cut down the #AncientTrees. Developers wanted to build roads through the #wilderness.Bureaucrats argued that the forest was "too wild," that it needed to be "managed," controlled, made productive.
Simona fought them all.
She wrote letters. She filed lawsuits. She gave interviews where she spoke bluntly about what would be lost if the forest fell.
She stood in front of bulldozers.
She made powerful enemies.
She didn't care."This forest has survived for ten thousand years," she'd say. "Who are we to decide it should end on our watch?"
Her cabin became a symbol. Journalists came from across Europe to photograph the woman who lived with wild animals. Documentaries were made. Her story spread.
And slowly, the tide began to turn.
Public opinion shifted. International pressure mounted. UNESCO got involved. The ancient forest, in large part because of Simona's tireless advocacy, gained greater protections.The trees she loved were saved.
Simona Kossak lived in that cabin until 2007, when illness finally forced her back to the city. She died in 2007, at the age of 71.But her legacy didn't die with her.
Today, Białowieża Forest stands as one of Europe's last true wildernesses—a living monument to what the continent once was. Tourists walk trails where Simona once walked with Żabka the lynx. Bison graze in meadows she fought to protect.Scientists still study the forest using methods she pioneered.
And somewhere in those ancient trees, maybe, a descendant of Korasek steals something shiny from an unsuspecting hiker.
Simona Kossak proved something the modern world desperately needs to remember:
That you don't have to choose between science and intuition. Between civilization and wilderness. Between being human and being part of nature.
She proved that sometimes the most rigorous science comes from simply paying attention. That the deepest understanding comes from respect, not dominance.
She proved that one person, living authentically and fighting fiercely for what they love, can change the fate of an entire ecosystem.
They called her a witch because she spoke to animals.
She called herself a scientist because she listened.
And she spent thirty years in a cabin without electricity, surrounded by wild things, protecting an ancient forest from a modern world that had forgotten how to be still.
Simona Kossak wasn't running away from civilization.
She was protecting something far more valuable than anything civilization could offer.
And because of her, that forest still stands."
#Rewilding #NatureLover #CitizenScientist #Nature #SaveTheForest
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#GoodNews that the Little Penguin population around Granite Island is holding (though still with really low numbers (18) of nesting pairs). This is in spite of the forever ongoing Algal Bloom / Infestation.
The best bit of info is what these guys do to maintain privacy :)
:: Spoilers ! :: >>>
"Once a week I take home a mountain of penguin poo and I know there's a camera inside that,"
...
"They literally back up to it and cover it. We get about three nights of coverage before it's smothered."Given the infamous smell, THATS commitment.
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NSW "cowboys continue to knock down huge swathes of healthy forests."
"ACF says satellite evidence shows mass native habitat destruction by farmers."
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2025-06-21/acf-citizen-scientists-satellite-images-of-land-clearing/105436794
#biodiversity #LandClearing #ThreatenedSpecies #beef #meat #cattle #extractivism #EPBCAct #CitizenScientist #degradation #NSW -
I am a #CitizenScientist at heart, and it bothers me not that #technology is prevalent and powerful (high speed, high storage capacity), but that such improvement of our technology is gatekept behind massive #paywalls.
(TL;DR: the cost of a portable genome sequencer and also data storage makes it unattainable to collaborate as a citizen scientist, and that makes me big mad 😡!! I know we can do something about it.)
I dream of an internet #infrastructure that would enable me, and others, to #democratize data, storage space, and processing power. Such would bolster research and study across many fields of knowledge.
Allow me to set the scene.
- A #PublicCommons #CommunityMesh #MeshNetwork interlinks public and private schools, weather broadcast stations, public government buildings, medical facilities, public transit centers, large housing complexes, and observation towers in public parks for civil and public academic use. Low-power Radio Wide Area Networks (#LoRaWAN) might prove useful here for environmental sensors.
- #FreedomBox or no-assembly-required #SelfHosting #cloudlet solutions bring #FaultTolerance to the hands of #WebService architects.
- #NetworkAttachedStorage (#NAS) equips locations connected to the network with an opportunity to share _some_ data storage capacity as a cache for the functions of the greater network. (In my opinion, altruistic features should be opt-out conditions.) Such might confer a cache of operable @wikifunctions representations.
- #UniformResourceName (#URN) resolvers (e.g., such as for #DOI, #ARC, #ISBN, #IPFS) give us what we need to collaborate as communities to organize our #DataSets and to distribute amongst our community the load of resolving names of data to their resources.
- the #ResourceDescriptionFramework, or #RDF, lets us claim to properties, attributes and metainformation of a resource. This is useful for cataloging and searching through datasets to find pertinent information. (E.g., by category: music, video, lectures; photos, figures, charts, diagrams; databases, manifests, ledgers, logs; etc.)
- #Peer2Peer clients create a distributed #ComputeFabric for domains of interest.
Major hubs of the network publish off-loadable functions in "initiatives" to: collect, clean, stage, process, recollect, and report sets of data for research within their pertinent areas of interest. (E.g., universities or parks might produce functions to operationalize a project to collect and study evidence of climate change.)
Client-Devices subscribe to the initiatives that their owner finds worthwhile and commit to serving requests they receive for such functions.
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The scene is set. Now we imagine:
You subscribe to a citizen science initiative and travel anywhere with your portable sensor(s): a #GenomeSequencer or #Spectrometer, a #SchumannResonance or #Radiation detector, a #Barometer or #Thermometer or #Hygrometer or #Decibellometer.
You take #measurements, name them and fill in whatever #metadata about them you can. When you submit your dataset to the network, the publishers of every #initiative of which you are part are notified so that others can search for it through them via the metadata you ascribed to the dataset. When others search for and find your dataset, they, too, can process it according the functions within the network.
By this our internet would become a virtual meta-machine; this could assist in the symbiotization of #civilian #academy and #inventive #altruism.
(TL;DR: the cost of portable genome sequencers and data storage makes it hard to collaborate as a citizen scientist, and that makes me big mad 😡!! I know we can do something about it.)
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I am a #CitizenScientist at heart, and it bothers me not that #technology is prevalent and powerful (high speed, high storage capacity), but that such improvement of our technology is gatekept behind massive #paywalls.
(TL;DR: the cost of a portable genome sequencer and also data storage makes it unattainable to collaborate as a citizen scientist, and that makes me big mad 😡!! I know we can do something about it.)
I dream of an internet #infrastructure that would enable me, and others, to #democratize data, storage space, and processing power. Such would bolster research and study across many fields of knowledge.
Allow me to set the scene.
- A #PublicCommons #CommunityMesh #MeshNetwork interlinks public and private schools, weather broadcast stations, public government buildings, medical facilities, public transit centers, large housing complexes, and observation towers in public parks for civil and public academic use. Low-power Radio Wide Area Networks (#LoRaWAN) might prove useful here for environmental sensors.
- #FreedomBox or no-assembly-required #SelfHosting #cloudlet solutions bring #FaultTolerance to the hands of #WebService architects.
- #NetworkAttachedStorage (#NAS) equips locations connected to the network with an opportunity to share _some_ data storage capacity as a cache for the functions of the greater network. (In my opinion, altruistic features should be opt-out conditions.) Such might confer a cache of operable @wikifunctions representations.
- #UniformResourceName (#URN) resolvers (e.g., such as for #DOI, #ARC, #ISBN, #IPFS) give us what we need to collaborate as communities to organize our #DataSets and to distribute amongst our community the load of resolving names of data to their resources.
- the #ResourceDescriptionFramework, or #RDF, lets us claim to properties, attributes and metainformation of a resource. This is useful for cataloging and searching through datasets to find pertinent information. (E.g., by category: music, video, lectures; photos, figures, charts, diagrams; databases, manifests, ledgers, logs; etc.)
- #Peer2Peer clients create a distributed #ComputeFabric for domains of interest.
Major hubs of the network publish off-loadable functions in "initiatives" to: collect, clean, stage, process, recollect, and report sets of data for research within their pertinent areas of interest. (E.g., universities or parks might produce functions to operationalize a project to collect and study evidence of climate change.)
Client-Devices subscribe to the initiatives that their owner finds worthwhile and commit to serving requests they receive for such functions.
--------
The scene is set. Now we imagine:
You subscribe to a citizen science initiative and travel anywhere with your portable sensor(s): a #GenomeSequencer or #Spectrometer, a #SchumannResonance or #Radiation detector, a #Barometer or #Thermometer or #Hygrometer or #Decibellometer.
You take #measurements, name them and fill in whatever #metadata about them you can. When you submit your dataset to the network, the publishers of every #initiative of which you are part are notified so that others can search for it through them via the metadata you ascribed to the dataset. When others search for and find your dataset, they, too, can process it according the functions within the network.
By this our internet would become a virtual meta-machine; this could assist in the symbiotization of #civilian #academy and #inventive #altruism.
(TL;DR: the cost of portable genome sequencers and data storage makes it hard to collaborate as a citizen scientist, and that makes me big mad 😡!! I know we can do something about it.)
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What 6 degrees of warming means for a community built on ice
#Alaska is warming far faster than most of the world. For #Indigenous people on the front lines, adaptation can be surprisingly simple.
by Joseph Lee
Jul 3, 2024,“As temperatures continue to rise, Alaska Natives are turning to intergenerational knowledge and community observations to build a wealth of data that they hope will urge non-Indigenous decision-makers to listen to what they have to say.
“In #Unalaska, the largest city in the Aleutian Chain, the #Qawalangin Tribe is gathering community feedback on #ClimateCrisis and what the people are experiencing. The tribe will then use these observations to help develop its climate #resilience plans, which include culture camps with traditional dances and classes on kayak making, traditional food nights, and water quality testing programs.
“Vera Metcalf is the executive director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, which represents 19 coastal communities. Metcalf says that Indigenous walrus hunters have adapted to climate change by participating in research projects led by agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service. 'In the past, we were largely ignored in research occurring in our homeland and waters,' she said. 'When you combine the two ways of thinking, it really becomes a rich resource of information.'
“Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, #Iñupiaq from Utqiaġvik, is the project coordinator and community liaison at the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub, where she works with observers from four communities in the Alaskan Arctic.
“Community observers share details like air temperature, wind speed, ice conditions, and animal observations, sometimes sending in photos of animals being harvested. Glenn-Borade and her team then take this data and share it with agencies like the US National Weather Service [#NWS], which releases forecasts for the region. Glenn-Borade says that, historically, these forecasts prioritized larger ships offshore rather than #IndigenousPeople living on the coast and hopes that using local observations will lead to better forecasts for Indigenous communities. 'That kind of foresight of what the conditions will be can really make a difference between life or death,' she said.
“Glenn-Borade also says this kind of #LocalObservation provides invaluable historical context about how the coast and the ice have changed over the years, what is within normal ranges, and what is unexpected.
“‘That’s what Indigenous knowledge is,' she said. 'It is constant tracking and understanding and monitoring what’s going on and being prepared to respond on the fly.'“
Read more:
https://www.vox.com/climate/358597/climate-extreme-heat-alaska-indigenous-solutions#IndigenousSolutions #ClimateCrisis #ExtremeHeat #CitizenScientist
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So, sighted some bees that were smaller than #CarpenterBees. They *might* be Queen Bumblebees, who are out before the workers and males. According to the #MaineBumbleBeeAtlas, workers and males sometimes don't emerge until the first week in June, so maybe they are late. I thought I saw a couple during an early spring thaw -- hopefully, not all of them emerged back then. I also saw a lot of smaller bees -- sweat bees, miner bees, a few honey bees -- and, of course, the humingbird moth (not a bee, but a pollinator).
Finding the Bees in Your Yard
"The most likely place to find bees is in the flowers of native plants, when the day is sunny, relatively calm, and the temperature is above 70°F. To be active, fly, and feed, bees need to be warm. A few species are active below 60°, but most prefer temperatures above 72°. Wind makes flying more difficult because it requires more energy.
"Although some species may be active by late February if temperatures are unusually warm, the vernal bee species (those present in the spring) generally become active by mid-April. You may observe them on early blooming flowers, such as willow catkins and dandelions. Some native bee species continue their activities into the autumn until the last asters, dandelions and autumn dandelions die. The greatest diversity and abundance of native bees is in midsummer, unless there is a lack of suitable flowers, perhaps because of drought, heavy rains, or how the landscape is managed.
"Other places to find native bees are where they nest. Look at the soil along bare banks with a sunny southern exposure. Look in bramble canes, beetle borings in snags, and in abandoned birdhouses. If you do search for bee nests, remember to be cautious for yourself and respectful of them!"
https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/7153e/
#Bees #BeeSightings #Maine #CitizenScientist #GardeningForPollinators
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To my #DigitalHumanities & #AI/#ML folk: As a #SelfDirectedLearning indie #CitizenScientist, I am reluctant to make a clean break and move to the m’don federation. Twitter has been an essential channel for evolving my #PLN Personal Learning Network. At 71-yo, I know how impossible it was in the pre-Internet world to engage directly with world class researchers in your domain of interest. But I increasingly feel uncomfortable with how things are evolving at Twitter. Hello from Colorado USA, 👋🤓✌️
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Hi @acpresso 👋🤓✌️TY4Follow. Given your linguistic interest, you may be interested in this article: https://bit.ly/Witmores-text. I wrote this post-cancer in 2015 at start of my rebirth as a #DigitalHumanities #CitizenScientist. This helped me develop my #SelfDirectedLearning #PLN Personal Learning Network by opening communication with #digitization researchers like @patrick_sahle asking them for feedback & resource suggestions.
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@ct_bergstrom - As an unfunded #DigitalHumanities & #AI/#ML #CitizenScientist and #DisabledDeveloper, the move to online & hybrid events has been a pandemic-accelerated helpful side-effect for us #SelfDirectedLearning folk. Combined with #OpenAccess publishing and #AcademicTwitter for my #PLN Personal Learning Network, I hope many of these trends become the #NewNormal.