Sharman Apt Russell is a widely published and anthologized nature and science writer based in New Mexico, United States. Her topics include citizen science, living in place, public lands grazing, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, and Pantheism. She is also an avid citizen scientist.
On this episode of Nature Revisited, Russell introduces us to the exploding world of citizen science, where hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migrations, finding stardust for NASA, and in Russell's case, studying a little-known species, the Western red-bellied tiger beetle. She relates the exciting and rewarding aspects of community science and explains how the sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology and data collection, has begun to shape how research gets done.