- The University of Wisconsin Arboretum is 1200 acres of land
right in the center of Madison
that's been protected since the 1930s.
The Arboretum is a place for university professors
and students to do research.
It's a place to learn about how we can best restore nature.
And it's a place where people from Madison,
and from Wisconsin,
and throughout the world can come to experience nature.
* *
The natural world is changing today
at rates that are unprecedented.
That means that
it's really important that everybody gets engaged,
at whatever level they can,
in trying to preserve what's left
and to restore what we've lost.
And that's one of the things
that happens through citizen science.
- That's a good one.
Oh, yeah, in flight you can see the features
because the wings are up out of the way.
- Citizen science is the engagement of people
who aren't professional scientists.
I think everybody is a scientist at heart.
But that can mean collecting data,
coming up with questions
and figuring out how the data should be collected,
or analyzing data and sharing findings.
- What we'll be doing today
is trying to take pictures of bumblebees.
We want to take multiple pictures of each bee,
assuming that one comes in.
And then we'll have a whole set od pictures for each individual
and that'll give us the different views
that we can identify the bees from.
* *
- We know that bee numbers are declining.
So the pollinator project is one of our focus projects
at the Arboretum.
What we're asking is that people take pictures of the bees,
and they don't have to be super high quality.
They just have to be enough for us to be able to zoom in
and figure out what the species are.
* *
Understanding their distribution and abundance
will help us build their populations back up to robust
and sustainable levels.
[buzzing]
The Arboretum was one of the first places
that Asian jumping worms were found in Wisconsin.
So we started doing this research here.
And this project is really documenting
the moving front of an invasive species.
- We'll pour half of it inside the frame.
Then we'll look for some small wiggling masses.
There we go. That's good.
Here they come!
These are the Asian jumping worms that we're concerned about
in terms of their potential impact to forests
and to our gardens.
We'll count the number that come to the top
and that'll give us a number of earthworms by species
per square foot.
And we'll have a good idea
how abundant they are in a given area.
* *
- Whether it's birds or butterflies or worms,
we can't study them without a lot of involvement
on the part of people besides professional scientists.
And citizen science can be done anywhere:
in schoolyards, in parks,
in nature centers, in backyards.
Citizen science provides
the eyes and ears and boots on the ground
that can help us answer specific ecological questions.
* *