Scientists can’t be everywhere all at once, as much as they’d like to. Many of the problems citizen science helps solve are concerned with s
Some really cool stories of citizen scientists allowing researchers to cast a wider net in a variety of environmental areas such as:
•Invasive species detection and eradication
•Historical climate data
•Mosquito and mosquito-borne disease tracking
•Wombat monitoring
If this is at all your jam, checking out citizen science initiatives in your area or those with remote participation. Most are low resource and time commitment and some only involve work that can be done on the computer--like comparing pictures or transcribing scanned historical documents.
US agency bows to pressure from farmers after concealing crucial info from public: 'Blatantly unlawful'
"We stand ready to ensure that USDA follows through on its promise."
By Yei Ling MaJuly 5, 2025
In February, a group of farmers and environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for wiping its websites of crucial climate data used to inform agricultural planning.
Last month, the USDA retracted its decision to maintain its climate data purge, handing a huge win to the farmers and environmentalists that held the department accountable for its rash data purge.
The USDA's decision to restore the removed climate-related web pages came just days before a hearing for a preliminary injunction to restore the pages and to prevent the removal of more.
According to InfoDocket, in a letter filed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the USDA stated it would "restore the climate-change-related web content that was removed post-inauguration" and commit to complying with federal laws regarding future posting decisions.
Farmers are taking legal action against the Trump administration's so-called "climate change purge."
The Agriculture Department pledged to restore online climate information that farmers said helped them do business, but which officials had
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion.
The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service sites, and the U.S. Forest Service’s “Climate Risk Viewer,” which included detailed maps showing how climate change might affect national forests and grasslands.
The lawsuit, filed in February, said the purge denied farmers information to make time-sensitive decisions while facing business risks linked to climate change, such as heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires.
The suit was brought by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York along with two environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group.
The plaintiffs had sought a court order requiring the department to restore the deleted pages. On Monday, the government said it would oblige.
Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to Judge Margaret M. Garnett that he was representing the Agriculture Department in the lawsuit, and that the department had already begun restoring the pages and interactive tools described in the lawsuit. He said the department “expects to substantially complete the restoration process in approximately two weeks.”
Mr. Clayton asked the judge to adjourn a hearing scheduled for May 21. He said the department proposed to submit a report on its progress restoring the data after three weeks, and sought to address “appropriate next steps in this litigation.”
Jeffrey Stein, associate attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit that represented the plaintiffs, along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said, “We’re glad that U.S.D.A. recognized that its blatantly unlawful purge of climate-change-related information is harming farmers and communities across the country.”
The NASA climate spriral visualization with labels in English and Celsius. || GISTEMP_Spiral_English_degC_2160p60.01400_print.jpg (1024x1024
@nasa has included a link to the source data, but the spirograph I'd really like to see would go back more — in this case they are discussing only the Industrial Era, so only consider from 1880, but we know from Byron and Shelly there was a deep chill in those years. If we could go back geologically, the resolution would be poor, but might it double-underline how FAST current changes are changing? (or if there are precarious resonances!)
According to Project Drawdown and Unesco, educating women and girls could result in an 85.42 gigaton reduction in global carbon emissions by 2050, making it one of the most single effective solution to climate change. (source)
