[Pollinator] Citizen Science in Australia

[John Purdy]

Thank you very much for this interesting and detailed response. I certainly
share many of your views and appreciate the examples and the reference to
history. Going further back, I cited the work of Francois Huber from 1794,
which I hold as not only an example of citizen science, but also as one of
the best examples of the application of the scientific method, with
repeated cycles of observation, analysis and interpretation.
https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PnhlAAAAMAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=Nouvelles+Observations+Sur+Les+Abeilles%27+(New+observations+on+bees)+in+Geneva+in+1792&ots=zQuMJ49XgG&sig=WZqjfT0CowxGjT6ggMj4Uz_l4vI#v=onepage&q=Nouvelles%20Observations%20Sur%20Les%20Abeilles'%20(New%20observations%20on%20bees)%20in%20Geneva%20in%201792&f=false
I hope this link takes you to an 1841 translation of his work on the mating
flights of honey bees and a brief biography.  What is so fascinating about
this work is that Huber was a monk trained in theology not science, he was
completely blind, and he conducted well planned experiments using a
technician who was also essentially a citizen scientist. What i learned
from this is the discipline to design each successive experiment to answer
a question and to conduct the experiment following the plan.
My concern with what is being done today by so many graduate students is
that it is not well planned, and it saddens me to see the waste of
resources, time and effort, and the heartache that bright young students
experience when they start writing a thesis and discover an obvious mistake
in the design that renders their work useless. The worst example is
searching for the colour pigment in bird's feathers. Why would a graduate
committee allow this work to start? I also see many peer reviewed papers
that do not follow published standard methods or mention why not and do not
validate their methods, and there are hundreds of papers that report a
biological effect without a no-effect dose level. The results are useless.
So this awareness, with my experience doing experiments to meet Good
laboratory Practice (GLP)
standards, spurs me to plan experiments in more detail and build standard
operating procedures and validated methods into the process. I train my
field people to work from the documents not from memory or by looking to me
for directions; I use data recording sheets to ensure measurements are not
missed and I do rehearsals to ensure that the system is working in the
hands of those using it. It may sound elaborate but it actually works so
much better in the field. It is surprising to me to find old field reports
from the 1930's that meet the same standards of data recording. It is not
easy to get personnel to use this GLP data recording standard in full, but
it is very much easier to analyse and report the results.
With this level of preparedness, it is possible to get good relevant data
from volunteers in the framework of citizen science. I think Kit's
commitment to good science is vital, and hope she finds this helpful
Regards, John purdy


On Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 7:35 PM Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Oct 15, 2025, at 2:20 PM, Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> John:
>
> Citizen science has a different and older origin in Australia, especially
> as it pertains to pollination.:Since the late 19th century, Australia has
> enjoyed a line of gifted amateurs studying the life histories of native
> biota. It’s obvious these people understood scientific methods and critical
> thinking based on their publications. In particular, reading contributions
> to "The Victorian Naturalist" from the 1920's-'60's has its rewards and
> will familiarize you with the pollination studies of Edith Coleman, Tarlton
> Rayment, Trevor Hawkeswood and Ros Garnet. Sometimes, these people modeled
> their long-term research on the books of Charles Darwin. Sometimes they
> corresponded with professional scientists. Tarlton Rayment wrote to T.D.
> Cockerell at U. of Colorado. Edith Coleman exchanged information with Oakes
> Ames at the Harvard herbarium. Citizen scientists persist in Australia.
> Perhaps the greatest citizen scientist-insect-pollination-biologist today
> is Rudie Kuiter. He has a page on ResearchGate and you might like his books
> as he is a professional wildlife and fish photographer. I will explain the
> contributions of some of these people in my upcoming book for CSIRO
> Australia in 2026.
>
> Why do we associate so much data on Australian wildflowers, small
> marsupials, perching birds, anthophilous insects, fungi, snails etc. with
> people who lacked degrees in Biology? This is one consequence of
> British colonization of countries in the southern hemisphere. How else can
> we explain the success of the employment and deployment of the late Jane
> Goodall to Africa? Australian settlers were confronted by alien biotas
> while the ratio of professional (government employed) scientists in
> Australia to native species was laughably low. As explained to me by my
> professors at the University of Melbourne 45 years ago, botanists were
> expected to identify and describe the habitats and distribution of native
> timber trees and any other plant of commercial importance. Amateurs got the
> wildflowers. Ornithologists dealt with the bigger flightless birds (emus,
> cassowaries, bustards cockatoos and water fowl) while amateurs got the
> doves and dicky birds. Entomologists focused on nasty DIptera and the
> despoilers of crops and timbers. Amateurs got butterflies, Christmas
> beetles and everything else while their children made collections of
> cicadas. You get the point. However, the smarter scientists knew they could
> depend on the citizen scientists and vice versa. Rudie Kuiter takes the
> insects he catches on native orchids to my colleagues at the Melbourne and
> Sydney Museums as I have. Incidentally, that’s why there is a Lasioglossum
> bernhardti.
>
> What Kit proposes can be done with the training you suggest. Once upon a
> time, that entomological/botanical training was available through the many
> natural history clubs in both urban and rural Australia but I’ve noticed
> they are on the wane.  Here in America there are even greater dysfunctions.
> Scientists, graduate students and field technicians will have to step in
> and educate the new generation of citizen scientists if the scientific
> community wants dependable data and reproducible results..I agree AI is
> untrustworthy and I certainly wouldn’t trust iNaturalist identification for
> most lineages of anthophilous insects, would you? To date, the infamy of
> iNaturalist identifications comes from the recent murder trial in
> Gippsland, Australia. She found Amanita phallodes using iNaturalist,
> dehydrated them, cooked them in a beef Wellington and fed them to her
> in-laws with fatal results. Check it out on YouTube.
>
> Peter Bernhardt
> Research Assoc. The Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis, MO
>
>
>
>
>
> i
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/pollinator/attachments/20251023/2f1adff4/attachment-0001.htm>