What are some opportunities for amateur scientists to contribute to real scientific progress in their spare time?

Wild-life conservation and ornithology are two fields where amateur scientists already contribute. More amateur involvement could help transform more citizens into becoming better committed and engaged stewards of their local environments. Such contribution may even be vital in this era of massive climate change. Committed eyes and ears on the ground help every bit as much as professional researchers in mapping and quantifying how climate change is impacting flora and fauna.

The Amateur Scientist And Wild-life Conservation: The Example Of Chennai, India, Students And The Olive Ridley Turtle

By the Bay of Bengal, the South Indian city of Chennai is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. No surprise that population growth and economic development threaten its local ecology. One casualty has been the Olive ridley sea turtle. Globally they've steadily lost their nesting sites and are now considered endangered. Annually returning to the same beach where they hatched, female turtles lay their eggs in a process of synchronized nesting. Thus, every year like clockwork, from January until April, Olive Ridley turtles arrive at Chennai's southern beaches, from Neelankarai to Edward Elliot's Beach, a distance of ~ 7 kms. Turtle eggs are highly vulnerable to predation and of course to man-made depredations, inadvertent or otherwise. In what is possibly one of the most beautiful and touching examples of volunteerism or altruism or service for the greater good or call it what you will, since 1987, the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network, a voluntary group of mainly students gathers every night from January until April. From 11PM until ~ 3 to 4AM, they walk the 7 km beach stretch, looking for newly laid turtle eggs. They collect and relocate them to a nearby hatchery. When hatchlings emerge 45 days later, the volunteers release them safely into the sea.

In their own words (1),

'The SSTCN was initially organized and operated by students, aged 16 to 25. While a few ‘non – students’ (lawyers, biologists, conservationists, business professionals, etc.) advised, the leadership, organisation and manpower were principally from this age group. Once students finish courses, they routinely leave Madras [now renamed Chennai] after participating in or leading the organisation for two to three years, so the SSTCN has seen a high turnover of both membership and leadership.

SSTCN’s activities include beach monitoring, hatchery management, protection of clutches left in the beach (‘in situ nests’), and education and awareness campaigns; the programme has continued from 1988 until present. Each season, the group establishes a hatchery at Neelangarai, and every night from end-December through mid-March, the same 7 km stretch of beach is patrolled. Some years, when there are enough volunteers, the patrolling extends an additional 5 to 10 km beyond Neelangarai to the north. Due to egg predation by feral dogs and people, most nests along this stretch are highly vulnerable.

Consequently, most egg clutches that can be found are relocated to the hatchery. At the hatchery, nests are monitored and a few days prior to expected emergence of hatchlings, they are enclosed with plastic or thatch baskets, to restrain the hatchlings from crawling on to the beach, where chances of predation are high. Hatchlings are released at the edge of the sea the same night of emergence, and the respective nests are excavated to evaluate hatching success.

Experiments with nest spacing and shading have been conducted to improve hatching success, which has remained over 80% during most years since 1992 (Shanker 1995, 2003). Average densities on the beach range from 10 – 15 nests with eggs per km, and the group has collected between 50 and 200 clutches per year (now totalling some 120,000 eggs) and released about 80,000 hatchlings over the past 15 years (Shanker 2003). Since 1988, the sstcn has also been conducting education and awareness programs.'

More information about this volunteer activity on their web-site, SSTCN. I urge interested readers to fully explore this simple and beautiful web-site. Detailing the kind of co-ordination and effort necessary, this is a wonderful example of a purely grassroots volunteer-driven conservation effort. Unsurprisingly, naysayers have questioned the utility of this project, which the volunteers have countered most persuasively and cogently. Rather than simply focus on numbers of turtles saved, this effort also educates the local population about these turtles and about wildlife conservation in general, and thus raises their general awareness about the importance of such measures. As well, in its years of existence, this volunteer program has inspired several to pursue careers in ecology and wildlife conservation.

In their own words again (1),

'Every weekend during the season, members of the general public and students from Madras accompany the SSTCN on ‘turtle walks’ when they are educated about sea turtles and conservation.

Why we do this a question that has often provoked heated debate both within and outside the group is the utility of such hard work and dedication just to release a few thousand hatchlings each year. This result comes after much effort in organisation, long nights walking beaches and never seeing a turtle, and sacrifices to time that could be otherwise spent in studies, with family, or in more conventional hobbies, not to mention the expenses often incurred to each participating student. When the problems that face the hatchling are seemingly insurmountable – it has been suggested that one in 1,000 or less survive to reach maturity – it is often questioned if all the effort is really helping the turtles. SSTCN’s success lies in its role as an outreach program rather than strictly as a wildlife conservation program (something that many members of the group, but not all, do realise).

Thanks to the students’ network, thousands of people in the Madras area have been on a turtle walk; many have seen hatchlings – which are indisputably amongst the most charismatic ambassadors of conservation, and a few have even had the fortune of seeing a nesting olive ridley. Many student members have been motivated to pursue careers in ecology, ecotourism, wildlife management and conservation.

Even if they are doomed, and sea turtles on the Madras coast do not survive the coastal development, fisheries and other threats, these turtles (and hatchlings) still help conservation through their singular contribution to education and outreach programmes.

They help motivate and shape young ecologists and conservationists who might go on to save turtles or other species of wildlife elsewhere. Though nesting along the Madras coast has been extremely low in some years (2.5 nests/ km), there does not appear to have been an overall decline over the last fifteen years. While the long term conservation program may have prevented a drastic decline thus far, the intensity of threats has increased. The main threat to adult sea turtles along much of the Indian coast is fishery related mortality, with about 10 – 20 dead ridleys washed ashore every season on the northern coast of Tamil Nadu. Fishing villages dot the entire coastline of the state, and opportunistic egg poaching by members of the fishing community and other communities living on the coast, as well as depredation by feral dogs are major problems.

Furthermore, as residential, middle class colonies spread along the coast, beachfront lighting and subsequent disorientation of hatchlings is becoming a serious problem along a greater stretch of this coast each year.'

The Amateur Scientist And Ornithology: The Example Of Migrant Watch, India's First Citizen Science Effort To Collect Ecological Information About Bird Migration

Every year from July to December, >300 bird species touch down in India on their way further south from Africa, China, Europe and Russia. A citizen science effort now called eBird India, Migrant Watch was funded by the Bangalore based National Center for Biological Sciences. According to Sahel Quader, Migrant Watch's founder (2),

'Arrival and departure dates are an effective way of measuring the effects of climate change on bird migration...Citizen science can tell us about global warming just by arming people with a pair of binoculars and a little training'

'In India just two years of citizen science have transformed shy homemakers, geeks and retirees into skilled outdoor scientists. They are marching out into the great outdoors, taking on the classic pose of nature watchers, feet planted on earth and necks craned up to identify the flutterer between leaves and swooshers in the skies.

Early walkers are certainly getting the birds. Aniket Bhatt, an infotech consultant, was the first to log on to Tracking bird migration across India in August 2007. He says, “All I could identify were seven rosy starlings in Ahmedabad.” Since then, over 800 volunteer watchers have documented 195 migrant species, landing, living and leaving India, with their sharp-eyed sightings and swift keystrokes. Helping them along are identification markers and pictures on this ‘open access’ online database.

Ramit Singhal, a shy 19-year-old, knows about the birds and the bees as well as everything about birds called bee-eaters. Right from their distinguishing black-eye-stripe to how they feed on wasps without feeling the sting.

Despite being colour blind and a birding novice 18 months ago, this soft-spoken engineering student has recorded 378 bird species across India. Though he can’t tell green from orange, he doesn’t confuse green bee-eaters with brown laughing doves. Size, call and patterns are enough. Quader calls Ramit “a citizen science superstar”.

Walking about in the highly polluted Okhla Bird Sanctuary in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, a wetland stopover for migrant birds where methane bubbles up from the waters, Ramit casually picks out gliding black kites, yellow-bellied prineas and striated babblers on reeds. It’s only the beady gaze of a red-necked falcon that turns him into a gawking teenager, who ogles this awesome raptor loudly exclaiming: “Oh man! This is my first one.”

“Initially, we chose nine species,” says Uttara Mendiratta, coordinator, MigrantWatch. These were picked out for commonness, wide distribution and identifiability. Or, birds outside our windows like barn swallows—the first migrants in Jul —and rosy starlings, their entire global population winters in India.

With birds from wetlands, grasslands and forests making marathon migrations here, “We’re uniquely positioned to get good information about the mysteries of migration and climate change,” says Gopi Sundar, India research associate for the International Crane Foundation.

The late Indira Gandhi was perhaps our most prominent citizen scientist. Each year when she sighted a black redstart, she’d mail an exultant letter to Salim Ali, the late ornithologist. Snigdha Kar, a Delhi-based climate activist is following in Mrs Gandhi’s tracks. “I’m looking everywhere for the pied-crested cuckoo,” says the young hobby birder. The arrival of this stark black-and-white bird from Africa coincides exactly with whimsical monsoon winds which lift it to our shores'

So there you have it, two spectacular examples of amateur science in action.

Bibliography

1. Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network History. History

2. Waiting for Godwits. Open magazine, Pramila N. Phatarphekar, August 8, 2009. http://www.openthemagazine.com/a...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-opportunities-for-amateur-scientists-to-contribute-to-real-scientific-progress-in-their-spare-time/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala