Residents of Barton and neighboring counties have the opportunity to participate in scientific research and activities through an initiative facilitated by the Kansas Wetlands Education Center (KWEC). Citizens Science Projects is a program open to people of all ages regardless of their science background.

KWEC Director Curtis Wolf said citizen science is any activity where the public is encouraged to voluntarily participate in the scientific process. Activities involve collecting data, conducting experiments, interpreting results, reporting discoveries and solving problems.

“Numerous citizen science programs exist,” Wolf said. “Some of the activities are very simple and require very little time and effort, while others require participants to invest more time and effort.”

The KWEC has been locally involved in several projects, including Christmas Bird Counts, Breeding Bird Surveys, Frog Watch USA, Monarch Butterfly Tagging-Monarch Watch, Journey North Migration Tracking, eBird, iNaturalist, Great Backyard Bird Count, World Shorebirds Day-Global Shorebird Count, NABA Butterfly Count, and Quivira NWR Bio Blitz.

Public response to these activities has been positive, largely due to the high level of involvement from participants, said Pam Martin, education specialist with the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism.

“I think any program which engages people to become active participants gives them a sense of ownership and expands their feeling of worth,” Martin said. “Greater understanding and knowledge, on any subject, creates an increased sense of pride and caring about that subject.”
She added that citizen science projects serve as effective vehicles for the public to make the connection between the knowledge learned and its application.

One of the latest projects was a first for the state of Kansas. Sponsored by the Friends of Cheyenne Bottoms, the state’s first Chronolog sites were set up at Cheyenne Bottoms. According to Wolf, Chronolog sites have been established across the U.S. to engage the general public by allowing them to participate in documenting environmental change through time at certain sites through capturing landscape pictures.

“Friends of Cheyenne Bottoms thought this might be a great way to provide another interactive component to visitors of Cheyenne Bottoms,” said Wolf. He noted that one of the sites is already active and the next site should become active within the next few days. He added that the sites feature a plastic bracket to hold a phone-camera and an instructional sign to explain how to submit the photo.

“We’re encouraging visitors to stop, take a photo and submit their photo to our Chronolog sites,” Wolf said. “These photos will be added to the other photos from these sites to create timelapse strings of each location.” He said over time, the photos can be used to document seasonal and long term changes that occur to those ecosystems. “Anyone can view timelapse photos from any of the Chronolog locations at chronolog.io,” said Wolf. 

Martin said the local projects are largely comprehensive in scope and cover a range of academic disciplines. “There are citizen science programs for about any discipline of natural sciences,” she said. “KWEC has used many of these well-established citizen science programs to provide engaging projects for our constituents.” Specific species researched include monarch butterflies, lady bugs, frogs and toads and milkweed plants. 

On short-term effects, Wolf said most citizen science projects create immediate opportunities for people to get involved and data collected from those projects start generating information that can be used immediately. “However, many of these programs are designed to be long-term monitoring efforts, in which the data collected are archived to a long-term database that can be used by scientists to determine trends,” he said.

Frog and toad monitoring at Cheyenne Bottoms have been in progress for a while, according to Martin. She said the monitoring provides a long-term database to determine the health of both the frog/toad population and that of the marsh. “Frogs and toads are indicator species,” said Martin. “If they are absent, the habitat has probably been compromised in some way.” She noted that factors such as drought and chemical intrusion can have a negative impact on marsh habitats.

In 2020, Cheyenne Bottoms was one of the few areas to experience a large sustained monarch migration as compared to the rest of Kansas and the Midwest. “Through these citizen science projects, we are able to document monarch butterfly eggs, larva and adult numbers from March through October with Journey North,” said Martin. “Scientists access that data to determine population numbers, migration events and timing.”

Normally, many of the citizen science programs have a social component that encourages participants to work together but that structure has changed, according to Wolf. 

“With COVID-19, this is difficult to do,” he said. “But the pandemic has also brought many people looking for outdoors activities. Some of the citizen science programs work very well for social distancing.”

For people who would like to make project suggestions, Wolf said they can contact KWEC by either phone or email. “Sometimes people contact us, as was the case with the Chronolog site,” he said. “They contacted us to see if we would be interested in establishing a site at Cheyenne Bottoms. FrogWatch also reached out to the Central Plains states to establish chapters, due to the lack of chapter numbers and data in this region.” 

For more information visit the KWEC website at wetlandscenter.fhsu.edu or call 620-566-1456. Inquiries can also be submitted to Wolf at cjwolf@fhsu.edu or Martin at pam.martin@ks.gov.