The highlight of my work as a citizen scientist was the opportunity to volunteer in a spectacular setting. What has been the highlight of your work as a citizen scientist? Although I was a novice birder, recording data reported by a highly skilled birder was well within my skill set. The whale watch companies allowed the teams access all along the coast, from Gloucester to P-town. I was invited to volunteer as a data recorder working with a skilled observer to record bird species seen on Stellwagen Bank while observing from a whale watch boat. These were usually easy to detect and fix, thereby substantially improving the accuracy of the database as a whole. What I observed was that several types of ‘blunders’ had been made, particularly in the early years of the program. But the true benefit in cleaning up the database is for anyone that wants to analyze the measurements to look at long-term trends in the shape of a given beach. The monthly surveys have impacted me personally by forcing me to get outside no matter what the weather, all year-round. Has your participation affected you? How have you benefited from being involved? There are more than 7,000 profiles that have been taken over a nearly 25 year span, starting in 1999. But for me, the highlight was actually digging into the database of measurements that all these teams have made. It is satisfying to be monitoring the shape of the beach once per month. There are dozens of volunteer profiling teams that measure more than 70 such beach transects on the coast of Maine. Although I’m not a geologist, measuring changes in the shape of the beaches near my new home in southern Maine checked all those boxes! What has been the highlight of your work as a citizen scientist?Īs a volunteer beach profiler, I’m part of a team of three or four people that measure a specific beach transect (in our case, where the Ogunquit River meets the sea). When I retired at the end of 2016, I was looking for a volunteer opportunity that would continue to engage my interest in the natural world (as well as my love of data collection and processing) via monitoring the ocean.
I was a NOAA scientist for over 25 years, first as a geodesist and then as a physical oceanographer, measuring sea level rise from satellites via radar altimetry.
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