CITIZEN SCIENTISTS
Grassroots science plays key role in expanding what we know about Wisconsin’s natural world
So much is happening in the world of nature that sometimes the best place to turn to is, well, us.
Citizen scientists have emerged as key players in keeping track of Wisconsin’s plant and animal kingdom.
Their roles are as varied as simply counting what they see to contributing data to peer-reviewed journals and helping identify novel species.
Grassroots science has gotten a big boost from technology and the explosion of smartphones, trail cameras and positioning technology that effectively magnify the eyes and ears of the professional research community.
“That’s made a huge difference,” said Eva Lewandowski, coordinator of citizen monitoring for the state Department of Natural Resources.
The role of volunteers, she said, “has been a game changer for the field in Wisconsin.”
Academics and conservation officials are leveraging the collective know-how of groups with interests ranging from dragonflies to wolves to monitoring streams and lakes.
In one recent study, volunteers walked the beaches of Door County and other Lake Michigan shorelines and recorded the number of sick and dead birds.
A team led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor examined the birds and found that most tested positive for botulism. They concludglobal
ed warm water temperatures and algae generally were present before the birds died. The findings were published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in January.
In another study, monarch butterfly enthusiasts from Wisconsin took part in a project that used volunteers to collect and raise more than 20,000 monarch eggs and caterpillars beginning in 1999 to understand the impact of insects attacking the caterpillars.
The study was headed by Karen Oberhauser, a former University of Minnesota conservation biologist and currently director of the UW-Madison Arboretum. The findings were published last year in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.
Underscoring the importance of technology, Snapshot Wisconsin, a volunteer-based wildlife monitoring project run by the DNR, currently has an inventory of nearly 22 million trail-camera photographs from more than 1,000 cameras dating back to 2016.
It was trail cams that provided much of the early evidence of cougars’ reappearance in Wisconsin. Six individual males have visited Wisconsin since 2008, according to the DNR, which posts vetted field photos of the big cats.
This summer, the DNR is asking paddlers and anglers to photograph and chronicle mussel species, which play an important role in aquatic ecology by filtering contaminants.
About half the state’s 52 mussel species are endangered, threatened or listed as a species of special concern.
The agency has posted a video that shows how to collect samples and email photographs for identification.
“This is very much an example of us having more boots on the ground,” said Lisie Kitchel, one of a pair of DNR scientists who inventory mussel populations.
The citizens’ work will add to three years of DNR field research concluding this summer. The aim is to periodically benchmark mussel populations and track the changes. The last statewide count took place about 40 years ago.
Jesse Weinzinger, the other mussel scientist with the agency, said he spends three or four days a week in the field from May to October. But it wasn’t Weinzinger who discovered the last new species of mussel to be found in the state.
It was Brenton Butterfield, then working as a lake ecologist for a consulting firm (and as of this summer a DNR employee), who discovered the eastern pondmussel in 2014 in a chain of lakes near Three Lakes, northeast of Rhinelander in Oneida County.
The discovery, confirmed by Kitchel via email, was the first time the mussel has been found this far west — and the first time in the Mississippi River watershed.
“We wouldn’t have known about the presence of that mussel without that input,” Weinzinger said.
The role of citizen scientists is not new. In 1900, Wisconsinites trudged outdoors in the first annual Christmas Audubon Society bird count.
Sites like Wisconsin eBird quickly post updates of activity such as the winter arrival of snowy owls from the Arctic, or the news in May 2016 that a whitewinged tern had been spotted along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Manitowoc. The tern normally resides in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
Citizen scientist Jim Hess, 71, lives on 50 acres in Lafayette County in southwestern Wisconsin where he is methodically rooting out invasive species this summer as part of an effort to restore prairie grasses and a population of large scattered oak trees.
He has erected more than two-dozen bluebird boxes on his property and surrounding land. To monitor things, he sticks a wireless-connected GoPro camera inside the boxes.
Data from his spreadsheet show from 2008 to 2017, the bluebirds have laid a total of 1,144 eggs; 924 have hatched and 757 survived to fly. He sends the information to the North American Bluebird Society, which promotes research and conservation.
Hess also monitors bats and American kestrels. The populations in his bat boxes have plunged from a high of 141 in 2016 to zero this year. The culprit likely is white-nose syndrome, a disease that is killing bats by the millions nationally and was discovered in Wisconsin in 2014.
“A lot of these things I took up because I had some interest in them and then it turned out that I was able to provide data that’s actually helpful to academia — particularly the bat situation,” Hess said.