Citizen Science!
As we get closer to the summer months and the programs return to the beach, we of course are always looking for volunteers to come join us on the beach educating visitors. However, there is another way to volunteer with the program that is a ton of fun. We participate in multiple citizen science programs. Citizen Science means citizens just like you and I collect data and send it in to be analyzed by scientists. One of my favorites that we do is the MARINE Sea Star Survey. For this survey we go out during a negative low tide and count every single Sea Star in the tide pools....just kidding. We have two different plots (one on the south side and one on the north) and we count all the sea stars just in those plots. We use flashlights to look deep in all the cracks to make sure that all of the teeny tiny juveniles are being counted. When doing the survey, we are looking at the size and health of each Sea Star and writing it down. Through collecting this data, MARINE can track what is go...