Science athletes take to the far-flung fields
On most beautiful winter Saturdays, Erika Nunlist, a college freshman, can usually be found backcountry skiing in the Rockies. But Nunlist chose to spend a recent sparkling day searching for greenish lumps of wolverine excrement.
“Oh, yeah, I love collecting scat,” Nunlist, 19, deadpanned as she bagged a sample. “You wouldn’t have heard me say that for our dog around the house.”
Gregg Treinish, an experienced outdoorsman, organized the outing to track the elusive wolverine, the largest member of the weasel family, across this rugged landscape. A dozen volunteers had come to learn how to track the animal’s prints and collect samples as a part of an effort called Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation.
The program, which Treinish founded, enlists outdoor athletes as hardy field assistants to scientists in need of data from far-flung places. Some expeditions are group efforts, but much of the data is collected by the lone hiker who pauses on the trail to inspect a plant or the rower who drops her oars to observe a pod of whales.
“Every single day there are tens of thousands of people who are outside getting after it,” said Treinish, 30, who was named a 2008 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year for trekking the length of the Andes. “They’re going to these places that researchers wish that they could get to.”
Treinish founded the group out of a sense that adventure for its own sake was a bit selfindulgent. He soon found that others, from hard-core alpinists to day hikers, shared his yearning to contribute more to the natural good.
So last year he began a match-making service, connecting scientists to the appropriate members of the outdoorsy set.
Soon, data started tumbling in. Two of the world’s top climbers scaling Mount Everest found the highestaltitude plant life ever recorded, a yet-to-be-named moss. Hikers on the West Coast’s Pacific Crest Trail are now collecting information on the pika, an alpine member of the rabbit family that is a valuable indicator species for climate change. And glacier trekkers are keeping an eye out for ice worms for a researcher in Alaska.
The payoff for adventurers is the warm feeling of giving something back to their wild playgrounds. Researchers have found this new relationship a bit trickier.
Yes, it saves them time and money to have volunteer eyes and data collection from outof-the-way places. And many scientists have come to see this collaboration as a way to inject some missing adrenaline and pizazz into often slow and painstaking work.
But relying on data collected by neophytes for research that may be submitted for scientific peer review can be risky. April Craighead, a wildlife biologist at the Craighead Institute, a conservation research group founded by her father-in-law in Bozeman, Mont., enlisted volunteer hikers to collect data for her work on the pika. Of the 40 or so people who agreed to help, she said, only a handful
followed through with usable observations.
One volunteer boasted that he had photographed a badger eating a pika. She was thrilled— until the images arrived.
“It wasn’t a pika, it was a ground squirrel,” said Craighead, who plans to continue working with volunteers after some tweaks to the process and an emphasis on clear, simple observations.
Treinish said the collaboration with Craighead had suffered in part because of deep snow, which hampered the volunteers’ collection of data.
Citizen science is not a new concept; for decades the Audubon Society has encouraged birders to spend their Christmases using binoculars to identify and tally their finds. Many parks, preserves and zoos have public-outreach programs.
Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation is a newer, more extreme iteration of that model. Treinish started the group with a $250 donation, a cellphone, and plenty of enthusiasm. He lives low on the nonprofit food chain, paying himself minimum wage and taking in some extra money working as an outdoor guide and lecturer.
Russell Hopcroft, a professor of marine life at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, sees the beauty and the thrift in linking his studies of the health of zooplankton, a major food source for fish, with a monthlong expedition led by Paul Ridley, a Chicagoan who plans to row a 29-foot boat 1,100 miles across the Arctic Ocean with three companions this summer.
Chartering a research vessel can cost more than $50,000 a day, Hopcroft said. “This is an incredible buy if they’re able to get some useful science done at the same time.”
Strapped to their boats will be a zooplankton dragnet, a sampling container and observational equipment. “They’ll be covering a big chunk of ocean, and there are things that we don’t learn from a satellite,” he said. “People are going to see this as having that edge to it, and you don’t get that with your science very often.”
Ridley, 28, has also agreed to record whale sightings during the journey— another match made by Treinish.