Protocol In Focus: Why Do We Use Two Types of Trap?

One strength of the Crab Team protocol is that it enables us to confidently compare findings among different sites, and track changes over time – even if different people are doing the sampling. With sampling on this scale, even the small steps can be important to what we learn from the data. The Protocol in Focus will allow us to expand on these details, and offer an opportunity to see all the behind-the-scenes planning that goes into methodology!

Some volunteers have noticed that the Fukui traps are more often ...

Building Citizen Science with Volunteers as Partners: Part 3

The field of citizen science has grown explosively over the last decade, benefitting from excellent PR, Presidential shout-outs, advances in big data, and, not least, a Web 2.0 world replete with hashtags, networks, and crowdsourcing. It turns out people love doing science in their spare time! The historians remind us that, actually, what we call citizen science is not a recent invention (e.g. Audubon Christmas bird counts date back to 1900), but the current ...

Protocol in Focus: What Is “Haphazard Sampling”?

One strength of the Crab Team protocol is that it enables us to confidently compare findings among different sites, and track changes over time – even if different people are doing the sampling. With sampling on this scale, even the small steps can be important to what we learn from the data. The Protocol in Focus will allow us to expand on these details, and offer an opportunity to see all the behind-the-scenes planning that goes into methodology!

Almost every volunteer has had the question: When we measure crab size, ...

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