Why have you remained a member of your Rotary club?
- To participate in local service projects
- For friendship and fellowship
- To connect with others outside of work and my circle of friends
eClub Rotarians are located across the world - Mexico, England, Italy, the United States, Guatemala, Ado-Ekiti Ekiti, and more. Getting everyone together to do a service project is difficult at best. Two notable successes are the Let's Leave No Girl Behind and the Navajo Solar project.
Here are some projects that all members can participate in:
Smithsonian Scientists Are Using Ginkgo Leaves to Study Climate Change—They Need Your Help
Citizen scientists can submit leaf samples from their hometowns through the end of August
By Meilan Solly
SMITHSONIAN.COM
The next time you venture into the great outdoors, keep an eye out for Ginkgo biloba trees, which can be easily identified by their distinctive fan-shaped leaves. If you find one—and you likely will, as the native Chinese plant is now ubiquitious in the United States—take a moment to pluck a few leaves, snap some photographs of the scene, and record your observations via the iNaturalist mobile app. Then, package your sample in an envelope, drop it into the mailbox, and give yourself a pat on the back. Congratulations: You’ve just become a citizen scientist, helping researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History use ginkgo leaves to study the past, present and future of climate change.
Perhaps best known for its pungent smell and medicinal properties, ginkgo actually boasts an impressive backstory. As the online portal for the museum’s Fossil Atmospheres project explains, the conifer plant (meaning it has seeds but doesn’t produce flowers) arrived on the scene more than 200 million years ago. Surviving three mass extinctions, including the one that killed the dinosaurs, ginkgo has retained a remarkably similar appearance throughout its time on Earth. This characteristic makes it possible for scientists to easily compare modern specimens with fossils dating to the distant past—a practice that could help researchers assess how the planet’s atmosphere has changed over time, as well as predict what effect future climate shifts will have on Earth’s living creatures.
To contribute, interested parties must follow a detailed set of instructions outlining the process of obtaining, recording and submitting specimens. Be sure to follow every step, from identifying the sex of a chosen ginkgo tree to noting its exact location, uploading photos and observations to the iNaturalist app, and properly packaging the leaves, or else the scientists will not be able to use your sample. For more details, visit the project’s website or email NMNH-Fossil-Atmospheres@si.edu.
Attention nature-lovers, the @smithsonian needs your help in a #CitizenScience project! Gather leaves from Ginkgo trees, mail them to our @FossilAt research team, and advance our understanding of Earth’s climate history! #FossilFriday https://t.co/5Ay7g58hUu pic.twitter.com/oePfpC1vQk
Citizen Science: Leaf Survey
A component of the Fossil Atmospheres project
In order to understand how well the features of ginkgo leaves reflect the climate they grow in, we need to study leaves from trees growing in many different climates.
Ginkgos are the perfect plant for this. While their natural range is restricted to China, ginkgo trees can now be found all over the world, transported to new places by humans. Ginkgos also have a rich fossil record dating back to the Jurassic Period, meaning we can apply what we learn about reconstructing climates from today's ginkgos to the past hundred million years through beautifully preserved fossil leaves.
fa-we_need_ginkgo_leaves.mp4
How can I help?
We're looking for citizen scientists to send us leaves from their communities!
What you will need
Watch the video or follow the instructions below to join in with the research. A PDF of the complete instructions is also available for download here and a one page version is available here.
If you are sending a sample from outside of the United States please follow this additional protocol to ensure the sample reaches us.
Questions? Email NMNH-Fossil-Atmospheres@si.edu
The Library of Congress Needs Your Help Transcribing Suffragist Papers
Nearly 16,000 pages of diaries, letters, speeches and other documents are available on the library’s crowdsourcing platform.
In 1922, the American suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt traveled to Italy to help prepare for the upcoming Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome. Back home, Catt was a towering figure of the women’s rights movement; she had succeeded Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and played a pivotal role in securing the adoption of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote. Catt was an efficient and effective organizer—and she was not entirely impressed with the way things were taking shape in Rome.
“A more unpromising place for a Congress I never saw,” she recorded in her diaries, describing the venue where the event was due to take place. “The Italian women could not comprehend our disapproval.”
Anyone can participate in the transcription effort. Once a given page has been completed, it must be approved by at least one registered volunteer before it is integrated into the library’s main website. “It's a consensus model,” explains Lauren Algee, By the People’ senior innovation specialist, “similar to Wikipedia.” Users are encouraged to tag documents, with the goal of supplying additional information that would not be captured by the transcription.
“I can't easily tell you what's in a lot of these papers,” Algee says. “There are scholars who have looked through every page of them and could read off ... a list of all the stories that are included. But I can't easily search for those things. Having volunteers delve into these papers, it's going to bring more of those stories to light.”
Awaiting transcription are documents pertaining to five suffrage leaders, among them Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two giants of the movement. The documents attest not only to their working relationship, but also to the intimacies that existed between them and their colleagues. In 1896, for instance, Anthony wrote to Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch, who was also a women’s rights crusader, to express her condolences for the death of Blatch’s young daughter.
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