Page - 13 - in options, Volume winter 2017/2018

13 winter 2017/18 ◼ optionswww.iiasa.ac.at A ndrii Bilous lives in Kiev, Ukraine, a professor of forestry and ecology at the National University. Rabul Hazarika is a geography professor in Assam, India. Anna Cipriani is a geochemist in Modena, Italy. And Ibrar ul Hassan Akhtar works for a space applications research firm in Islamabad, Pakistan. At first glance, the four may seem to have little in common. But in their free time, Bilous, Hazarika, Cipriani, and Akhtar are all hobby scientists, among thousands of volunteers around the world who have contributed to Geo-Wiki projects—citizen science campaigns run by IIASA researchers. Citizen science is hot right now. CitizenScience.org, a website dedicated to the field, currently lists over 1,000 projects around the world. Many of these projects focus on biodiversity and weather monitoring, the fields where citizen science first took flight, but projects range widely. In Australia, you can send in fish skeletons leftover from dinner to help scientists monitor the health of fisheries. In New York, researchers are asking cyclists to help monitor air quality and health impacts by carrying pollution monitors and wearing special shirts that monitor their heart rate and blood pressure. At IIASA, citizen science has blossomed in the past eight years from a small project focused on validating satellite land-cover data, to a research group of over 20 people working on around 13 current projects in 12 countries, with a network of nearly 15,000 citizen scientists like Akhtar, Bilous, Cipriani, and Hazarika. Many of these projects are linked in some way to land-cover data, maps of the Earth’s surface that provide key information such as the size and location of forests, agriculture, and cities. These data are vital not only for the global models that IIASA is known for, but also provide a potential breakthrough for monitoring implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And the team has become a hub for knowledge on citizen science, providing expertise and advice to partners around the world. Want to be a citizen scientist? Visit www.geo-wiki.org for details, follow @Geo_Wiki on Twitter, or sign up for the Geo-Wiki newsletter for updates on all the upcoming opportunities. FotoQuest GO: If you live in Austria, download the FotoQuest Go app and help IIASA scientists track land-cover change across the country! http://fotoquest-go.org/ LandSense: The EU-funded LandSense project will run a number of campaigns in spring and summer 2018. Sign up for the project newsletter to get all the news. https://landsense.eu/ GET INVOLVED