The Ecology Book

182

City. No tagged monarchs were

found, however, and it was not

until the following January that the

Urquharts found one—tagged by

two schoolboys in Minnesota the

previous August. Citizen science

had provided the hard evidence

that the butterflies migrated from

North America to Mexico. Now

it is known where millions of

monarchs spend the winter, the

emphasis has changed to tracking

their movements each spring and

CITIZEN SCIENCE

Monarch butterflies form a cluster

to stay warm during migration. Tagging

by volunteers revealed the monarch’s

migratory routes, and continues with

the annual “Monarch Watch.”

fall. Thousands of people

in Mexico, the US, and Canada

are helping build an ever clearer

picture of what routes the monarch

follows and how it deals with

changing weather patterns.

Citizens march on

More volunteer-based projects

were launched during the 1960s

and 1970s, including the North

American Breeding Bird Survey,

the British Nest Records Card

project, and a survey of sea turtle

egg laying in Japan. In 1979, the

Royal Society for the Protection of

Birds (RSPB) launched the Big

Garden Birdwatch in the UK, which

did not even require people to leave

their own homes, but simply

to record what they saw in their

gardens, backyards, or streets.

By 2018, more than 500,000 people

were participating, recording

7 million birds. The vast amount

of data gathered can now be

compared for every year back

to 1979. Without public help, this

would simply not be possible.

In 1989, the term “citizen

science” first appeared in print,

in the journal American Birds. It

was used to describe a volunteer

project sponsored by the Audubon

Society that sampled rain for

acidity. The aim of the project

was to raise awareness of the

acidification of rivers and lakes that

was killing fish and invertebrates,

and, indirectly, the birds that

preyed on them. It was also

designed to put pressure on the

US government, which soon after

introduced the 1990 Clean Air Act.

Citizen science has also proved

its worth for marine conservation.

In the Bahamas, a report in 2012

on declining numbers of the queen

conch, a large sea snail, led to the

formation of “Conchservation,” a

campaign that encourages locals

to tag conches. Another project,

set up in the US in 2010, at the

Science should be

dominated by amateurship

instead of money-biased

technical bureaucrats.

Erwin Chargaff

Austro-Hungarian biochemist

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