23 July 2015
3:00-4:00 p.m. EDT
Virtual meeting place: https://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/scnet
Citizen Science: A Symbiotic Future for Research and Education Using Biological Collections
Presenters: Emily Meineke (North Carolina State, Entomology), Steven D. Frank (North Carolina State, Entomology), Robert Dunn (North Carolina State, Biology)
Museum collections offer a lens into the past and a way to predict the future. These functions are especially valuable now as we try to anticipate how biodiversity will change with global shifts in climate and land use. Collections also offer a way to learn about the species that live with us in our most immediate environments, species that arguably should have the most pronounced effects on our wellbeing. Several recent projects leverage small collections from the past and larger, more recent collections built by the public to ask questions in biology while connecting citizens to native biodiversity. At NCSU, we house several such projects at various stages of development that use large and small collections for education. The most developed project School of Ants forged new symbioses between science and education. The most nascent of our projects will use herbaria to track herbivory across unprecedented scales of space and time. Here, we present this project as an example of how traditional research on small collections can be expanded to include a public component that builds larger collections and involves K-12 students in science.
