UNO Magazine Summer 2017
NESTing WITH CITIZEN SCIENTISTS
By Robyn Murray
When I met Charlotte Reilly at UNO, she had just finished an hour-long commute from her newest internship in Onawa, Iowa. A double major in environmental science and journalism, Reilly, who will be a junior in the fall, is interning for the U.S. Department of Agriculture this summer.
It’s the latest in a schedule packed full of classes, internships and activities. A writer for UNO’s student newspaper, the Gateway, and a member of UNO’s chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA), Reilly is also considering writing stories for Habitat for Humanity of Omaha. If she can find the time.
This spring, Reilly spent her after-class hours helping investigate water quality in Nebraska. She interned for the Nebraska Environmental Stewardship Taskforce (NEST), a project of the Nebraska Watershed Network — a UNO-based organization focused on preserving the city’s freshwater resources. The goal of NEST is to raise awareness about the amount of chemicals making their way into our water supply and the difficulties of removing them once they’re in. NEST engages communities in scientific research and aims to build trust in a field where it has eroded significantly. Just the kind of issue Reilly hopes to tackle as an environmental reporter.
The focus of NEST is agricultural run-off: pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals that may be tainting the water supply. The goal is to gather data and create a sizeable database that will be managed at UNO and serve as a resource in determining the impact of agricultural chemicals on the environment and aquatic life.
Making a Larger NEST
NEST is the brainchild of Alan Kolok, Ph.D., a professor of biology at UNO and the director of the Nebraska Watershed Network. For several years, he and his small team tested for chemicals in the Elkhorn River. He often found elevated levels of potentially dangerous chemicals, such as atrazine, a commonly used herbicide that has been shown to disrupt the endocrine system.
But the problem was the chemicals weren’t always there. The success of a field test depended on when the farmers may have sprayed and what the weather had been like. Had there been enough rain to wash them into the river?
So Kolok found a kind of litmus test: a “dipstick” testing strip that could quickly test the water for chemicals without a large field operation. Once he found that, he considered the possibilities: “I started thinking ... we could deploy citizens to collect data over a large geography using these strips really effectively.”
Deploying so-called “citizen scientists” meant the Nebraska Watershed Network could expand its scope tremendously.
“Technically, there’s only three of us,” says Krystal Hermann, director of NEST, referring to herself, Kolok and Reilly. “But this year, we had 300 citizen scientists around the U.S.” That’s for all of the Nebraska Watershed Network’s projects, which extend around the Midwest. For NEST, which launched in the spring and is specific to Nebraska, about 75 people from local high schools, colleges and businesses participated, Hermann says.
Citizen science also puts data in people’s hands, Kolok says, at a time when they don’t know who to trust.
“We’re in a period of having so much information and so much disinformation,” he says. “The general public to a large degree doesn’t really know what to believe.”
For example, Kolok says, there’s as much data out there about why bacon is bad for your health as there is about its benefits (think Atkins) or how climate change is most definitely real — and most certainly a hoax.
Citizen science builds trust, Kolok says, because people are able to see the data for themselves. For this project, they’re able to upload it a website and compare it in real time with data from other citizen scientists.
“We’re no longer at a point in history where we can say, ‘We’re scientists . . . let us do our thing and then we’ll tell you what to do from there.’ Our society has gotten too savvy for that,” Kolok says. “So we need to engage with the community and let the community know we’re not trying to tell you what’s good or bad, but we certainly will get you involved in the process and let you decide for yourself.”
Life Lessons
NEST is supported by funding from Wells Fargo, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute and the National Science Foundation.
Cristina Castro-Matukewicz, Wells Fargo’s vice president of community affairs, says the company supports “projects like NEST because they engage communities, scientists and the private sector in finding solutions to environmental issues.”
Kolok says NEST has also provided good lessons for the students and interns who participated, particularly how quickly trust can be lost with one “boneheaded” move. Students realize “this is affecting real people that live in my community, that live in my state, and it makes a difference to them,” he says. “It matters. That’s a life lesson.”
Students, he adds, get to “pull back the curtain” and realize the complexity of scientific field projects and research.
NEST is still in the data analysis stage. The team is hoping to publish the results and get the information into the hands of the public later in the year.
Reilly will be back to help in the fall. That will be before she heads to the Peace Corps (her after-graduation plans) where she hopes to work in conservation somewhere in Africa, and before she heads to graduate school, and before — fingers crossed — she lands at a prestigious scientific journal or nature magazine like National Geographic.
In the meantime, Reilly hopes to squeeze in a quick vacation to Minnesota in the summer and looks forward to scouring the NEST data when she returns.
“I just love understanding how things work,” she says, “diving in and dissecting everything around you and figuring out what makes it tick.” She is especially excited to spread the NEST campaign farther across the state, she added in an email. “Then, we can truly get a state-wide picture of how fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides affect our water supply.”