Splashing into Science
Citizen & Community Science Projects with Grand Canyon Youth
Science at Scale
Many plant and animal species call Grand Canyon National Park home.
Clockwise from the top left: Canyon wren, pallid bat, humpback chub, collared lizard, and razorback suckers.
But the sheer size of the Grand Canyon makes it difficult for scientists to study these creatures. The Grand Canyon is enormous! It is 277 miles long, 18 miles wide, and up to one mile deep .
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Park Service (NPS) need to collect lots of data to test their hypotheses and make conclusions about different species.
Collecting these data over long periods of time and across remote landscapes can be challenging, expensive, and time consuming.
GCY Citizen & Community Science
That's where Grand Canyon Youth comes in.
Grand Canyon Youth (GCY) offers educational outdoor expeditions that connect young people to the rivers and canyons of the Southwest. GCY takes more than 1,000 youth from around the country on the river each year.
Youth on nearly all of these expeditions participate in citizen and community science projects, working with real, working scientists to collect data.
These data can then help us understand the Grand Canyon’s ecosystem and have real-world impacts on how humans take care of our natural world.
Aquatic Insect Monitoring
Using light traps to measure insect populations along the Colorado River
The Colorado River’s ecosystem depends on healthy populations of aquatic insects, like mayflies, caddisflies, and black flies. These insects generally lay their eggs along river shorelines. This photo shows a large group of black flies on a rock.
These aquatic insects are at the bottom of the Grand Canyon’s food web: they provide food for the other creatures that live there, including birds, bats, lizards, and fish, like the federally-threatened humpback chub.
In order to monitor insect populations, GCY works with the USGS to help collect data along 250+ miles of the Colorado River! But how does it work?
Results and Impact
Over three years, youth scientists on GCY trips collected over 150 samples ! These data helped reveal that the insects that form the base of the food web are being impacted by the flow of Glen Canyon Dam.
Glen Canyon Dam is managed using a practice called "hydropeaking," which causes the river's water to rise and fall significantly throughout the day.
When insects lay their eggs at high tide, the water level falls later in the day, exposing those eggs to air. If eggs are not underwater an hour later, they can die .
This has cascading impacts up through the ecosystem — when other animals can’t rely on insects as their food source, they may not survive, either.
"Giving Bugs the Weekend Off"
As a result of this research, the Glen Canyon Dam started using experimental “ Bug Flows ” on the weekends in summer 2018-2020. Water was released at a low, steady flow from the dam, keeping insects’ eggs underwater and helping them survive into adulthood.
Preliminary results have found that Bug Flows increased the emergence of midges and populations of caddisflies, important food sources for other animals in the canyon.
GCY staff and youth examine aquatic insects in a jar.
The Bug Flow experiment is ongoing, but it's an important example of the difference that citizen & community science efforts can make for youth, scientists, and the natural world.
To learn more about GCY's citizen & community science partnership with USGS, check out the video, links, and sources below!
Citizen Science in Grand Canyon
