Author: CitSci.org

Training Materials Needed

Calling all project managers – we need your training materials! Do you ever wonder how your training materials and approaches influence data quality? You work hard to develop training materials and offer in-person trainings for your volunteers, yet the scholarly literature suggests that, despite your best efforts, land managers and scientists may still question the

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BioBlitz Inspires Inclusion of Citizen Science in Pollinator Research

A BioBlitz is a rapid species inventory that generally occurs over a 24 hour period with scientists and citizen scientists counting as many species as they can over this time in a given place. The goal of BioBlitz programs is to get the public excited about the science opportunities within their own backyard while at

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Stream Tracker

What is Stream Tracker? As spotlighted in our March Newsletter, Stream Tracker is a citizen science project funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Citizen Science for Earth Systems Program. It is run out of the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability (ESS) at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. Stream Tracker studies intermittent streams – i.e., streams

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Writing Hypotheses

By: Dr. Stacy Lynn, Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Colorado State University *Special thanks to Dr. Paul Strode and Dr. Cecilia Hennessy for encouraging us to update and improve this piece. Developing a hypothesis is a natural step in scientific inquiry, generally follows the development of a research question and functions as a tentative answer to

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Developing an Effective Research Question

Written by: Ellen Eisenbeis and Stacy Lynn Why is My Research Question Important? Setting your project up for success involves developing a research question that is clear, concise and achievable. This can be challenging, but is an essential step to creating a quality study. According to Jane Agee’s work on developing qualitative research questions, poorly

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Launching a Regional Water Quality Database with CitSci.org

By: Holden Sparacino, Outreach Manager with Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) Over the past two years, the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) has worked with CitSci.org to develop ALLARMwater.org, a database to house volunteer-collected data from hundreds of monitoring sites across Pennsylvania and New York, investigating small streams for potential impacts from shale

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