{"id":15177,"date":"2019-06-03T20:36:18","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T20:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/ner\/?p=15177"},"modified":"2019-06-03T20:36:18","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T20:36:18","slug":"eating-with-the-ecosystem-citizen-science-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_7\/2019\/06\/03\/eating-with-the-ecosystem-citizen-science-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating with the Ecosystem: Citizen Science Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What New England foods do you associate with summertime in New England?\u00a0\u00a0 I bet \u201cLobstah\u201d and \u201cFried Clams\u201d are in your top ten answers. Being a \u201cFoodie\u201d who has lived in New England my whole life, I am very in tune with using local ingredients choosing recipes that celebrate New England\u2019s local species and seasonal harvest. So when WGBH (my favorite local NPR station) aired a story with the title, \u201cJust 5 Types of Fish Dominate Our Seafood Counters, It Doesn\u2019t Have to be This Way,\u201d they had me at Hello!<\/p>\n

The story was about a citizen science project called \u201cEat Like a Fish,\u201d that was coordinated by Eating with the Ecosystem, a small nonprofit whose mission is to promote a place-based approach to sustaining New England\u2019s wild seafood, through healthy habitats, flourishing food webs, and short, adaptive supply chains (https:\/\/www.eatingwiththeecosystem.org\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This citizen science project was a bit different than a typical citizen science project that studies wildlife in their natural habitat. The \u201cEat Like a Fish\u201d project studied wildlife in a human habitat, specifically in New England markets, kitchens, and tables linking ocean to plate.<\/p>\n

The project enlisted the help of 86 seafood-eating, citizen scientists who gathered data from weekly shopping expeditions, home cooking experiments, and dinner-table taste tests. For 26 weeks these scientists searched seafood markets, supermarkets, farmers\u2019 markets and seaside fishing piers looking for 52 New England seafood species. Every week, each participant was randomly-assigned 4 seafood species to search for. The first goal of the project was to understand how well the New England retail marketplace reflected the diversity of the wild seafood from their nearby ocean ecosystems. When the participants searched for and\/or located their weekly assigned seafood species, they noted where they found it and where they didn\u2019t. When they found a species they were assigned, they took it home and made it for dinner. The second project goal was to use their lived experiences to help explain why they found the seafood where they did, and did not, and why a species may be difficult to find and what can be done to create a greater diversity in the number of species found.<\/p>\n

The following species of seafood led the pack in the availability in the marketplace:<\/p>\n