AN ONGOING EXPERIMENT
Given the chance to participate in research projects as diverse as monitoring amphibians and testing urban creeks for pollutants, everyday people are proving that, far from being mad scientists, they’re only too happy to help out.
Given the chance to participate in research projects as diverse as monitoring amphibians and testing urban creeks for pollutants, everyday people are proving that, far from being mad scientists, they’re only too happy to help out.
“How do you find anything in these reeds?” calls a nineyear-old boy, peering into the stalks at the water’s edge. “Just look for movement and listen,” says his 10-yearold friend. “Trust me, I’ve done this before,” she reassures him. In one sense, the kids are just doing what prairie kids have always done: looking for frogs on a hot June night. But these kids aren’t trying to catch the creatures; they are taking part in the Call of the Wetland project, an example of citizen science. The kids and their parents spend the next half hour skirting the perimeter of the horseshoe-shaped pond behind the Home Depot in Tuscany, periodically crouching down, hoping for a glimpse of a wood frog or a toad.
Call of the Wetland, like many citizen-science projects, uses volunteers to do very basic fieldwork. In Canada, regular Joes help scientists monitor trees, whales, butterflies, ice, weather and, my personal favourite, worms (WormWatch National Earthworm Survey, naturewatch.ca/ wormwatch).
“Citizen science is a hot topic right now,” says Tracy Lee, a senior project manager at the Miistakis Institute, a Calgary organization that uses citizen science in some of its conservation research projects, including Call of the Wetland. Lee manages that initiative and says that the current popularity of citizen science means two things: (1) the field is “fast-evolving,” and (2) it has to be used wisely.
“Some projects just aren’t appropriate for volunteers,” Lee says. “They require specialized expensive equipment or techniques that just aren’t practical.” So the rules of a good citizen-science project are: ask an important question, keep the task straightforward or do-able with a small amount of training, and make it fun to keep people coming back.
On that night in June at the wetland, we citizen scientists didn’t find any amphibians, just garbage, and plenty of it. One parent expressed disbelief at the amount, and said she should have brought along some garbage bags. The kids took it one step further, saying they should make a documentary detailing the need to clean up the wetlands. It was citizen science at its finest.
“The beauty of citizen science,” says Lee, “is that you can dovetail science goals with community outreach.” In other words, scientists get real data, the projects become transparent and accessible, and the people who take part become advocates for the program.
Better still, perhaps, most of these projects take place in the warmer months, meaning now is a good time to try your hand at a little science.
when croaking is a sign of health
Call of the Wetland begins with an app. It offers photos and sound clips of the six species of amphibians—boreal chorus frog, wood frog, northern leopard frog, western toad, Canadian toad and tiger salamander—that can be found in Calgary.
So armed, I stood on the rain-dampened grass beside that wetland in northwest Tuscany, surrounded by chirping red-winged blackbirds and dive-bombing sparrows. After downloading the app (callofthewetland.ca), I learned more than I’d ever known about Calgary’s amphibians, including the difficulty of distinguishing the Canadian toad from the slightly larger western toad by the former’s bulbous cranial crest. It’s much simpler to tell them apart by their distinctive calls.
The app’s use of the GPS on your smartphone makes it easy to record location and report observations, but finding the amphibians remains a challenge. The night I went out, my fellow citizen scientists all wanted to spot a tiger salamander. “They’re like the lions of the Serengeti—they’re so cool!” Lee says. But the distinctive amphibians—olive-green, yellow and black markings form a tiger-stripe pattern along their stumpy, thickset bodies— are secretive nighttime creatures, silently hunting frogs, mice, and even other salamanders. When I last asked her, Lee hadn’t seen one yet, but she hasn’t stopped looking.
I had no salamander luck either, but just as the sun slipped behind the hill I heard the undulating call of a boreal chorus frog. Moments later, another joined it, then another until I could no longer pinpoint the source of the sounds. I crept towards the water’s edge but the frogs stopped the second I got too close. However, hearing them is enough. It means they’re resident in the wetland, and that’s what the researchers want to know.
“We don’t know which species of amphibians are where in this city,” Lee says. “We have a data gap.” And there are lots of places to look; Calgary has some 4,000 wetlands. Some are tiny and others dry up to cracked mud in the summer, but they are the only habitat for the city’s amphibians.
Researchers at the Miistakis chose to monitor 60 wetlands across the city, which means they need a lot of people—about 150 to 200 volunteers—to help out.
Lee has taken her dad and a friend’s fouryear-old daughter. “What better way to spend an evening than going out looking for frogs?” she says. “And trying to figure out what’s there just from hearing the calls or seeing the eggs— it’s like being a detective. It’s just super fun!”
It may be fun, but there is a deeper purpose. “Wetlands help mitigate flooding by holding water, and amphibian populations can let us know if there’s a problem with the wetland’s health,” says Lea Randall, the Calgary Zoo’s amphibian expert. She adds that amphibians have porous skin, which means they absorb whatever is in the water, making them especially vulnerable to pollutants and contaminants. A strong population of amphibians can indicate a healthy wetland. Conversely, if numbers decline, it’s time to look for reasons why. “If the frogs are vanishing, there’s probably something wrong with the water quality or the habitat,” says Randall, “and it indicates that maybe we need to change the way we’re managing the landscape.”
Most of Calgary’s wetlands have been altered to accommodate storm water, which can have implications for their health, but on the night I poked around, litter seemed to be a more pressing concern. Lee and her colleagues have an ongoing challenge to see who can pick up the most plastic bottles. I saw dozens of bottles, plastic bags, pink straws, Tim Hortons cups, and even a partially submerged shopping cart in the reeds at the water’s edge. Elsewhere, Lee says, someone dumped a couch and a stove, and yet another site has earned the nickname “Dog Poo Wetland.” (Lee wouldn’t tell me which one.) “People are shocked,” she says, “and it makes them think, ‘Who does care for these things? Should it be me since I’m part of this community?’”
Call of the Wetlands will run in the spring and summer until 2019. The City of Calgary and the Alberta Government will have access to the final data, and Lee hopes the results will help guide the design of future neighbourhoods so that creating healthy, connected wetland habitats becomes a priority, not an afterthought. “We can design infrastructure to accommodate humans, but can we design it to support rich biodiversity, too?” she asks.
data on the banks
Reed Froklage’s portable science lab is a blue Coleman cooler on wheels. The mainstay of picnics in urban parks is a fitting piece of equipment for CreekWatch (creekwatch. ca), which enlists citizen scientists to measure water quality in urban creeks across Alberta.
Froklage is the corporate and citizen program co-ordinator for CreekWatch, which means his duties extend to training the citizen scientists who are a mainstay of the program. “Our volunteers range from corporate groups with no science background, to retired biologists who want to keep involved,” he says.
The program is now in its third year and expects to have about 100 volunteers trained by the end of the summer. In and around Calgary, it monitors 17 sites in the Bow River basin, including Jumping Pond Creek near Cochrane where Froklage spent a morning training a group of new volunteers.
Froklage set up his lab in a shady spot on the rocky shore of the creek. The CreekWatch kits contain the equipment needed to measure seven parameters of water health: dissolved oxygen, phosphates, nitrates, chloride, pH, and water temperature and turbidity. “At first, we considered testing for specific contaminants or pesticides, but those tests can be thousands of dollars to run,” Froklage said. “So it came down to which tests were feasible for our volunteers to collect.”
Crouching at the creek’s edge, Froklage showed the volunteers how to collect moving—not stagnant—water. The next step is to add some pre-measured powdered reagents that turn the water yellow. Then he used an eyedropper to add sodium thiosulfate—just enough to turn the solution from yellow to clear. The number of drops needed to effect this change is an indicator of how much oxygen is dissolved in the water. He continued for about an hour until he’d demonstrated each measurement and everyone felt confident.
These training sessions and the eagerness of the volunteer scientists mean that CreekWatch has an impressive amount of data. Want to know the water temperature in Confederation Creek? The latest measurement, from July 26, puts it at a warm 20 C. (All measurements are available at creekwatch.ca.)
But it’s difficult to know how healthy a given creek is based solely on the numbers. How much is too much phosphorous or nitrogen? What’s a “normal” pH and how does rain affect it? “You can really get into the nitty gritty of the chemistry,” Froklage says, “but we try to keep it from being too scientific and we use a kind of report-card grading system.” Last year, Calgary’s Fish Creek scored the top grade in the province. But for it to stay that way, Froklage says education is everything.
He says that the biggest misconception people have is that storm water—the stuff running off roofs and down the gutters after a rainfall or when the snow melts—goes to the water-treatment plant to get cleaned up. It doesn’t. “Cigarette butts, bottle caps, and the wrapper off your chocolate bar—it all ends up going directly into a body of water,” Froklage says. And, because some urban creeks receive stormwater from 60 or 70 outfalls, this is a crucial point.
Last year, CreekWatch recorded high levels of fecal matter in some creeks, most likely from people not picking up after their dogs. “Ideally, we’d like to see only rain going down the drain,” Froklage says. Until then, monitoring is required.
happy to be in the dark
Phil Langill is the director of the University of Calgary’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. It’s a position that gives him a unique perspective on the heavens and on more terrestrial matters.
The Rothney sits near Priddis, about 40 kilometres southwest of downtown Calgary. Each night as he drives home, Langill can see the bright lights of the northeastern ring road clearly on the horizon, and he wonders how light pollution from the ever-expanding city will affect the night skies. “We’re an observatory,” he says. “Everything we do relies on a dark sky at night.”
In the face of such an existential problem, Langill started the Dark Night, Star Light project in which Calgarians measure the darkness of the night skies in and around the city. For Langill, it’s a means
of being in many places at once in an effort to learn how the skies are changing as Calgary expands. And it’s a pressing issue: with work underway on the southern portion of the ring road, and Providence, a 32,000-person community planned for south of the city, he fears the dark could vanish.
Langill isn’t the only concerned party. In 2009, the Municipal District of Foothills (where the Observatory resides) passed a dark-sky bylaw. The nearby Cross Conservation Area is Canada’s first nocturnal preserve, a designation that reflects the park’s intention to preserve night skies for the benefit of animals. (Light pollution from artificial lights disrupts nocturnal animals by essentially turning nighttime into day.)
Add to that the effect of artificial light on humans—it can also disturb our sleep cycles and lead to a variety of health problems—and many people find ample reason to get involved. Citizen scientists begin by downloading a series of star charts from the Rothney’s website (ucalgary.ca/rao). Each chart shows what the night sky looks like with different levels of light. Then, about an hour after sunset, they go outside and, once their eyes have adjusted to the dim light, look for a prominent constellation—Orion, say, or Cygnus. They then take note of the number of the constellation’s stars they can see. In the middle of the city or with a full moon, it might only be the brightest one, but with less ambient light, more will be visible. Finally, they compare what they’re seeing with the star chart and upload their observations.
Langill wants observations from all over Calgary—they are submitted through the observatory’s website—from the bright lights of downtown to areas on the outskirts of the city. “It’s not just from the perspective of a silly astronomer who wants to look at the stars,” Langill says. “The philosophical side of me thinks that a dark sky is a natural resource— everybody should have access to clean water, clean air, and a star-filled night-time sky.”
Dark Night, Star Light has been running for three years, and, to Langill’s surprise, Calgary’s skies haven’t gotten much brighter in that time. “It’s a testament to city planners that people are thinking about lighting,” he says. “If you’re putting a light in your yard, do you need the 100-watt bulb and does it need to be on all the time?” he asks. There are smart, minimalistic ways to use light, like using cut-off light fixtures that direct light towards the ground, motion sensors, dimmer switches, and lower wattage bulbs. And then there are grander gestures. Dark Sky Preserves, protected areas for stargazing and astronomy, are cropping up across Canada; Jasper and Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park make particularly spectacular visits.
It all serves to remind us that we spend so much time looking at screens that it’s easy to forget to look at the skies. “And then suddenly the power goes out, and people are reminded that they love the stars!” Langill says. That reminder can also be something of a spiritual experience. “If you can see your shadow from the glow of the Milky Way behind you, you know you’re in a very dark place,” Langill says. “If you’ve never seen that, you really should try.”