Data from several places around the world suggests that pollinators are disappearing which has serious implications for our food supply and ecosystem health.  The Great Sunflower Project empowers people from pre-schoolers to scientists to do something about this global crisis by identifying at risk pollinator communities.  Using sunflowers as standardized thermometers for each site where they are planted, citizen scientists time how long it takes for five bees to visit their sunflower, effectively creating an index of pollinator service. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Results/Conclusions

When managed well, the return on investment for this type of science is potentially huge. Even a moderately successful program with 20,000 active participants could accrue 600,000 observations of bees.  A wildly successful program with 60,000 active participants could accrue almost a million records in a single year.   As of February 2009, the Great Sunflower Project had over 50,000 people signed up to receive seeds-creating the first social network designed to map pollinator service at either a regional or continental scale; and to gather quantitative data that is directly tied to pollinator service, rather than a correlate.