For all of social media's pros and cons, it's hard to envision another way a U.S. biologist could find more than 150 researchers from around the globe to simultaneously help answer an important environmental research question: How important is location and climate in the decomposition of plant material?
Decomposition is an important component of the carbon cycle, which helps to remove waste and recycle nutrients back into the environment to sustain life.
In 2014, University of Ontario Institute of Technology biologist Andrea Kirkwood, PhD, noted a crowdsourcing call for researchers to help collect environmental data from stream ecosystems, something very much in her research wheelhouse.
"It was a natural connection for our research team to participate in the project because we do so much work in streams, particularly in urban areas," says Dr. Kirkwood, Associate Professor of Biology in the university's Faculty of Science, and leader of the Kirkwood Lab. "This was a novel and consistent approach to standardize the measurement of decomposition rates in streams and riparian zones (plant habitats adjacent to streams) around the world."
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