CityLab Daily: Get Your Phones Out, the Cicadas Are Coming
Also today: Athens’ revival hinges on a pre-pandemic vision of paradise; Uber and Lyft are losing the race to the electric future.
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Courtesy of Cicada Mania
It takes a village: Brood X cicadas will soon emerge in parts of the U.S. after 17 years underground. And scientists like Gene Kritsky want people to get close, with their cameras ready. Video and photo submissions of the bugs, through the app Cicada Safari, will be part of one of the oldest citizen science efforts in the U.S. — dating back to the 1840s when an entomologist put call-outs in major newspapers asking people to send him details of periodical cicada sightings.
Over the years, the methods have evolved, and crowdsourcing efforts have become more expansive as researchers make use of new technology like GPS. The citizen reports will help the researchers better understand how Brood X — one of the largest and most widely spread — has changed over time, and how climate change and urbanization will affect their emergence. Today on CityLab: To Map Billions of Cicadas, It Takes Thousands of Citizen Scientists