A Rubric to Evaluate Citizen-Science Programs for Long-Term Ecological Monitoring

The value of citizen science for ecological monitoring of mammals

Citizen science approaches are of great interest for their potential to efficiently and sustainably monitor wildlife populations on both public and private lands. Here we present two studies that worked with volunteers to set camera traps for ecological surveys. The photographs recorded by these citizen scientists were archived and verified using the eMammal software platform, providing a profe...

Long-Term Ecological Monitoring

Smartphone-powered citizen science for bioacoustic monitoring

An initial classifier considers the main frequency component of the call, centered around 13.5 kHz and spanning mainly between 11 and 17 kHz. The ratio between this and a range where little noise is present (8–9 kHz) is a measure of the acoustic energy of the cicada call, as can be defined as: • Only cicada native to the UK • Only present in the New Forest • High pitched call at ~ 13.5 kHz • Di...

Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law

Over 2014, the Cornell University Legal Information Institute and the Australian National University worked with users of the Cornell LII site in a citizen science project to collect over 43,000 crowdsourced assessments of the readability of legal and other sentences. Readers (“citizen scientists”) on legislative pages of the LII site were asked to rate passages from the United States Code and ...

The Evolution of Long-term Care Programs; Comment on “Financing Long-term Care: Lessons From Japan”

The need for long-term care (LTC) represents a “new social risk,” one that overlaps with and complements systems of care that pre-date such programs, complicating LTC program design. This commentary expands on Ikegami’s discussion of how these structural factors must be accommodated, as well as historical and cultural factors that influence public expectations of such a...