Welcome to CitSci on the Farm

Intro to the Program

In this module, you will experience an over-view of the CitSci on the Farm program. Please keep in mind that while these teacher and student resources were designed in conjunction with the UC Davis Student Farm focusing on a bird biodiversity monitoring project, the resources were designed to be easily modified to support any biodiversity monitoring citizen science project.

Professional Development Resources

Student Engagement and Supporting Resources

  1. Designing an Observation Notebook (teacher and student facing slide decks English and Spanish)

  2. Setting Up eBird (teacher facing slide deck)

  3. Parent Intro Letter (PDF- English & Spanish)

  4. Recommended Reading (PDF)

  5. YouTube Connections- This is an editable slide deck archiving the resources on the CitSci on the Farm YouTube Channel by topic. Feel free to make a copy, and plug slides into lessons where appropriate to your context.

By engaging students (and families) in a participatory/citizen science project on school campus, or at home, with connections to the UC Davis Student Farm, classes can build a sense of community while attending to the Social and Emotional Learning needs as well as academic learning needs of students. For those of you who may not be as familiar with the term, citizen science is when scientific research is conducted by amateur scientists (like you and me and our students). The resulting data can then be used on campus, and submitted to further research within the scientific community. In this unit, we will focus on introducing a citizen science monitoring project, teaching students how to collect data from their own backyard or other nearby outdoor space.