Nancy M. Trautmann, Ph.D. - US grants

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Institute for Learning Innovation, and several environmental organizations are merging existing bird-focused citizen science programs with gardening and online social networking activities to provide older adult learners (age 35 and up) with opportunities to investigate the environmental impacts of implementing landscaping and carbon-reducing practices in their backyards, community gardens, and parks. The YardMap Network project is developing learning resources that will help gardeners, birders, and novices learn bird-habitat improving and carbon-reducing living practices by joining a nationwide ecological social network composed of more than 100,000 people. The goal of the project is to create online learning communities that move people from basic and intermediate levels ecological understanding to advanced levels of understanding by providing experiences whereby YardMappers learn about, design, evaluate, share, and invent conservation practices in their backyards and other green spaces.

While developing the network, the project will gather data to test the hypothesis that coupling citizen science activities with social networking technologies to create online learning communities improves participants' understanding of project-relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The project will track learning outcomes using standard evaluation techniques and by following individuals' routes of entry, network interactions, mapped garden practices, carbon-neutral behaviors, and their bird monitoring activities. YardMappers will divide naturally into treatment groups, creating a quasi-experimental design to test the importance of social networking for basic, intermediate, and advanced learning outcomes.

The research objective of this Interdisciplanary Research (IDR) project is to develop self-reliant, self-powered microsystems for autonomous biophysical monitoring. These systems will be applied to the understanding of avian flight biology through the development of a "Lab-on-a-Bird." The approach taken will be to intertwine a number of micro- and nanotechnologies (including biosensors, microfluidics, drug delivery, energy harvesters) with the living animal and will enable on-line monitoring of blood metabolites. The interdisciplinary project combines expertise from the Engineering and Ecology departments at Cornell University with the avian experts at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

If successful, the benefits of this research will be two-fold. The first will be from the development of the individual nanotechnology based components and the engineering behind integrating them into a single self-reliant system. It is expected that these systems would have impact well beyond the specific platform here, potentially leading to devices that can provide continuous human health monitoring or become nodes for networks of environmental sensors. The second area of impact will be in the development of an entirely new way of studying avian behavior. For example, these systems could enable us to track physiological changes in a single moving bird thereby yielding priceless information on its internal state and enable an unprecedented understanding of the movement decision-making. Eventually the technologies developed here could be eventually used to provide early warning of viral mutations and outbreaks and to better understand the health of the local ecosystems. A series of targeted curriculum and web-based experiences will also be developed that will engage both high school and adult audiences in learning about bird migration, related physiology, and the technological advances that are making possible new discoveries in these fields.

The project is an Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) Project jointly funded by ENG/CMMI and BIO/IOS.