Standards-based ecological citizen science in the Smokies

Rapid ecological change coupled with limited staff and funds makes it imperative to come up with ways to meet long-term resource monitoring goals. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, staff have created a series of citizen science projects that use students from diverse backgrounds to collect monitoring data. These studies, some in their 15^th year, were developed by teams of scientists, park educators and biologists, and classroom teachers. Students have access to the online data sets to ask their own scientific questions of data they helped to collect, providing relevance through personal involvement in ecological issues.