Home GOALS Partners Projects Activities
Every year in North America, thousands of citizen scientists record information on the continent’s butterfly species through a large variety of programs.  Butterfly monitoring began in the 1970s and has expanded rapidly, especially since 2000.  Yet currently these programs are little known and under-utilized by both the general public and the scientific community.   Further, the tens of thousands of observations that are recorded each year receive different kinds and levels of data management and most data are not easily available to the public.  At our inaugural workshop in May 2012, we formed a network of volunteer-based monitoring programs and supporting institutions with the goal of developing shared approaches to data management, visualization, and analytical tools designed to handle this increasingly large data stream. We have five major goals:  
GOAL 1: to track all North American monitoring projects and strive to include all programs in our network GOAL 2: to strandardize protocols and data as much as possible GOAL 3: to develop or enhance data management systems GOAL 4: to build data download and visualization tools GOAL 5: to expand program participation

 
Comments and questions should be directed to Leslie Ries (lries@umd.edu)

This project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF award 1147049) to the University of Maryland and the Socio-environmental Synthesis Center.