Tropes

Livescience_2013 01529.txt

#Citizen Scientists Key to Halting Sudden Oak Death (Op-Ed) Matteo Garbelotto is an extension specialist and adjunct professor in the Department of Environmental science Policy and Management at the University of California Berkeley. An expert in forest pathology and emergent infectious disease he contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The notable achievements that can result from engaging citizens in research are well known and the practice of working with so called citizen scientists aka volunteers has been established since these individuals started playing a pivotal role in the counting of birds in the early 1900s. Nonetheless there is still a prevalent belief that volunteers can only participate in research programs basically as unpaid field technicians playing a role that is strictly limited by the supervision of professional scientists. Despite statements on the need to move citizen science forward published as early as 2008 currently the will of leading scientists and major funding agencies to trust citizen scientists'data and financially support large projects heavily relying on volunteers is simply wanting The educational role of any activity involving the public is not in discussion here but I would like to present some insights based on my personal experience (now backed by results of recent peer-reviewed publications) and supported by newly announced citizen science projects. After spending over 50 percent of my time since 2006 working with volunteers on large projects it is my opinion that in a funding-limited world one of the best ways to move basic science forward is to work closely with the invaluable resource volunteers provide. Â We should not only employ them to report or count organisms but also treat them as peers and build strong cooperative efforts in which tasks are shared properly between professional and volunteer researchers. I am a forest pathologist and part-time mycologist working on among other projects Sudden Oak Death (SOD) an exotic forest disease that is forever changing the composition of coastal forests in Northern California and Southern Oregon. In 2006 I decided to enlist volunteers to understand the fine-scale distribution of the disease. At that time the cost of the operation was approximately $100000 and I was able to fund it mostly because funding agencies and their grant reviewers recognized that the activity called SOD blitzes had a strong educational component but there was no belief the program could generate valid data. We started by enlisting grass-roots environmental leaders in several communities and developed compulsory training sessions for each of them that guided hundreds of participants in properly identifying and collecting samples. We then used the bulk of the funding to process all collected plant material using laboratory tests that properly diagnose SOD. In six years we went from fewer than 100 to more than 600 fully trained participants and we expect collections to be more than 25000 samples in 2013. Last year over one million people accessed the results through the Web and newspapers. The cost of the blitzes has doubled almost in six years but $200000 would have supported only three or four technicians to do the fieldwork without the volunteers. The quality of the collected material the willingness of volunteers to share information about their own private property (by providing samples) the intimate knowledge that locals have of their own neighborhoods and the validation of all samples through the lab work have generated the most extensive fine-scale map of the distribution of a forest disease in the world. The data covers tens of thousands of hectares throughout California. Since last year the data that volunteers generated has become the backbone of the most comprehensive distribution map of SOD called SODMAP where volunteer government and academic data are combined all. The knowledge of the fine-scale distribution of the disease is essential for predicting (and preventing) oak infections as the pathogen will infect oaks only if they are within a couple of hundred meters of infected trees. Those results would be unimaginable from simply hiring three or four technicians per year. Volunteers have stepped definitely up with the SOD blitzes but it is another project that truly highlights how volunteers can be scientific peers to their academic counterparts. With recent estimates of fungi diversity ranging from approximately 720000 to over 5. 1 million species of which only approximately 99000 (or about 10 percent) have been described the status of this group of organisms as poorly known is established well and frequently discussed in the scientific literature. By contrast 90 percent of plants have been described worldwide according to estimates. Identifying specimens by tracking a species-specific DNA component (barcode) is an invaluable technique for tracking organisms like fungi that spend most (or all of their life cycles in a microbial stage. Yet researchers have selected DNA barcodes for only a small fraction of described fungal species . While everybody agrees that DNA barcodes must be associated with well-preserved and accurately described vouchered specimens (possibly types or holotypes) there is a deep schism in the scientific community about which specimens qualify as being good enough to provide a DNA barcode. One side is pushing for DNA barcodes to be provided only by academic experts in the field while the other side which I represent supports a larger-scale effort through which reasonably well-curated collections may provide the vouchers for DNA barcodes. With an estimated 600000 undescribed species and assuming 5000 taxonomists (a huge overestimate of mycologists with some training in taxonomy worldwide) bridging the gap in knowledge within 40 years would require everyone to classify 120 species during their career. That relies on a ridiculously hopeful estimate of 15000 new descriptions per year. Between 1980 and 2000 only 1100 species were described per year as reported by Bruce Barcott in The New york times in September 2004. In a recently published paper my colleagues and I describe an alternative approach that would help fill the gap in knowledge. We sampled every one of the 6000 taxa present in a fungal collection extracted DNA from them and attempted to generate a DNA barcode for each. The collection housed in the Museum of Natural history in Venice has a peculiarity: amateur mycologists collected 95 percent of the specimens and the collection is entirely curated by nonacademic volunteers. In the end we submitted over 1100 internal transcribed spacer (ITS) DNA barcode sequences to the National institutes of health's (NIH) Genbank and are still analyzing about 400 more. With the help of two leading taxonomy institutions (Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures in The netherlands and NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information) we analyzed the quality of the data with an approach that we describe in detail in our paper. Results showed that less than 5 percent of the samples were misidentified grossly and another 5 percent had minor potential misclassification issues. Therefore out of a total of 1500 samples 1350 barcodes could be generated with good quality for vouchered specimens. This was done by a single mycologist working part-time on a project over about six years using traditional (not next-generation) sequencing techniques. The method we described further allows us to pinpoint problems and has triggered already a revision of the most problematic groups housed in the Venice collection. Granted Italy has one of the most solid traditions in the world for macrofungal (i e. mushroom) classification and the collection is the official outlet of the largest amateur mycological association in the world (Associazione Micologica Bresadola) which includes over 13000 current members. However many other countries have comparable amateur expertise. It is time we as academicians and the agencies that fund us leave our ivory towers and generate true synergy with peers whose knowledge is not unlike ours a true calling. Error rates by specialists currently involved in submitting sequences have been estimated to be around 20 percent. So actually working with amateur mycologists may reduce that error rate by half and allow for an order of magnitude increase in the speed at which we bridge the gap in knowledge on fungal taxonomy. It is time for citizen basic science to be embraced. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher p

< Back - Next >