Definitely lots of undescribed leafminers in the area (and situations where it turns out to just be an unknown host plant for known species)
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Of course we can, but we must remember that formal education and scientific expertise are essential; otherwise, we will end up with chaos and a lack of quality. However, enthusiasts without formal education or with a different education, are often better observers of the problem than formal scientists, who often pursue grants and titles, leaving ethics aside. The quality of publications and basic integrity in the scientific community are also often problematic, but scientists are only human, so itās the same there as everywhere elseā¦
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Ever since I started using iNat Iāve imagined an augmented reality app which shows pop-ups of iNat observations around you as you pan the camera. Walking through a popular hiking spot would show you approximate locations and names of nearly every plant species in the area for example.
This is true. I know Iāve observed a small handful of undescribed leafminers and gall mites. It would take some persistence and effort to make progress with them but the necessary contacts are already on iNat and the resource requirements are well within most peoplesā abilities.
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I would argue the present is a uniquely important time in the field of non-academic science.
Western academia has only been increasingly industrialized and institutionalized and I think we can all think of ways this has lead to increasing disfunction within the world of natural sciences. Many, if not all, of us have our grumblings about the relationship between natural sciences and academia, though there are many ways in which we disagree about what exactly is the issue. In saying that, we can all agree that there is a certain degree of looming status quo upheaval.
This means now more than ever, education and transparency are of utmost importance. For a long time there has been assumption that meaningful ecology only exists behind locked, academic doors. While some of this is necessary, I think we are also understanding the ways in which it is not.
In my opinion iNaturalist is a naturally occurring emergent phenomenon of this shifting status quo, largely driven by the advent of the internet and social media. Itās impossible to assign a value system to this phenomenon this early on, itās just our new reality. I think thereās no harm in adopting the perspective that this sort of change can be positive!
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With my entire chest, I disagree that a formal institutional education is necessary to ensure quality and attention to detail. This very much needs to be taken on a case-by-case and field-by-field basis.
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A professional scientist once pointed out to me that there is a niche for amateur scientists in long-term studies. Most research is done by PhD students who usually have a three year post to get it finished. If they stay in academia, most of their research will come from supervising new PhD students. There isnāt the option to do the same study for 10 years.
Edit: I should add that a few times I have begun such studies and then I have moved on before they became long-term. And I also find that what was an interesting topic when I begin can become very tedious by year 5 and I dread it coming round to That Time Of Year.
Beware scientists asking you to collect material for their DNA studies. I have wasted so much time collecting specimens for such people and have never received a paper based on the findings.
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You also donāt have to spend an large amount of your time trying to get money to do research. The current selection pressures tend to lead to the population of universities with academics who are better at getting grants than they are at doing meaningful science.
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As I finish year 22 at one particular field site, I can second the sentiment that long-term studies offers its own niche. In addition, there was certainly some tedium at around year 5-10. Yet, having a dataset that I can mine for answers to certain questions that would otherwise be inaccessible in the grad-student mindset is fantastically fun. How long do these things live? Do they stay put or move around? Is there evidence of environmental influence, such as weather, from year to year?
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I did that in the Islands. Although the caterpillars of Cryptobotys zoilusalis were already known, the two host plants on which I found them were not yet documented host plants. This was one of those two most recent papers I mentioned.
(This is a species obscure enough not to have a common name; otherwise I would have used it.)
But isnāt that part of the barrier I described? The need for grants in order to do the studies at all? I sure wouldnāt have had the personal resources to purchase all those cattle tanks (the artificial ponds), nor access to the land to put them on (the universityās research campus). As long as ādoing scienceā requires so much equipment, those selection pressures toward being the best at obtaining grants will always be there.
p.s.:
Please warn us if your link goes to an hour-and-a-half video. We donāt all have time to watch one on the spur of the moment.
ā¦Iām not going to do that. You can see how long the video is when you click it.
Or rather, how about this, just assume that anything I post is probably an in-depth long-form video. There we go, youāre forewarned.
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Thank you. Finding out that it is an hour and a half after it already starts to play, adding it to my Watch Later list, then having to delete it from my watch history because YouTube counts the first few moments as āwatchingā ā this may not bother you, but that last step is tedious yet essential for me. This is why I turned off autoplay - so it wouldnāt start another video when one ends.
It is completely unreasonable to ask people to account for the preferences of anyone that may click on a link or respond to a post.
EDIT: Iām sorry that this thing bothers you, but I am not psychic and Iām not going to twist myself into knots trying to think of every little thing that may end up bothering people.
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Iāve spent a fair amount of time volunteering at bird banding stations which I guess is an example of non-academic science. These stations often run for decades and accumulate species, age, sex, and health data on thousands of birds over that time. In proximity to larger population centres they can run largely on volunteer support but usually they will at least need a paid master bander unless thereās someone whoās retired and willing to spend much of their time dedicated to it.
I feel that GPS tracking technology has made the original function of banding largely redundant, but itās still beneficial for outreach and does generate a ton of potentially useful data. Iām not sure how much that actually gets used.
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My perspective on this is maybe a little odd, but I think there are ways to really contribute if one can find a relatively understudied niche. Iām a nature nerd and a generalist, but for macro-critters, Iāve gravitated toward moths and spiders, and in MN, where I am, spiders are pretty darn understudied. A local professor is running a Spiders of MN project (to build a county by county list of spoods), and in projects like that, an observer (nature spotter) with an academic running a project can add real value.
But if youāre wanting to do basic science on your own, Iād recommend looking at littler stuff. Because MN has a decided absence of bugs in winter, I turned to looking for tardigrades in winter in 2020-2021. I learned the hard way at first (it took me two weeks to find my firstāI was going about it all wrong), but once I found one, I was hooked. I reached out to an academic (I was hoping for a key), and he let me know that there arenāt any keys, and asked if I wanted to make one. I said yes. As it happens, there are only three or so tardigrade records in the literature for my entire state. Some states haveā¦zero. Fast forward five years, and Iāve been hunting for tardigrades since. We were working on a paper together, but he unfortunately passed away. I have since started a new tardigrade project (last winter)āhow many tardigrades on that stick?āand Iām working on keying out the āgrades to my limited ability. Once Iām done, Iām going to loop in an academic to check my work, as it were, and hopefully (?) try to publish. The good news is that I know, for sure, that Iāve found something useful (a genus not previously recorded here).
A similar project could be probably undertaken in many locations, whether with tardigrades, nematodes (though IDing them is esp. tricky), rotifers, etc., or other small pals (mites, say). Doing this work is mostly a matter of some basic learning, followed by endurance, and a few technical things. The gearāI got a stereoscope and a compound scope from auctionsāis maybe a few hundred bucks. Thatās not nothing, to be sure, but in my view, there is still a lot to find.
In an ideal world, Iād love to loop in DNA barcoding/PCR and all that. Iām next to certain that thereās oodles one could discover if that were factored into such a setup, but thatās beyond my knowledge base at the moment (and itās spenddddy), though Iāve been looking into it.
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Communicating your findings is an essential part of science. (Listening / reading / watching videos as others communicate their findings is important, too.) I was frustrated reading a book about Leonardo da Vinci, First Scientist. Yes, he learned an amazing amount about how the human body is put together and how it moves, centuries before western scientists learned any of it. But his findings did no good at all for others because he couldnāt communicate them ā heād have been imprisoned, probably killed, for dissecting bodies.
Communication can start with going to meetings of local and regional natural history organizations (e.g. botany conferences). In general, yearly conferences include the opportunity to put up a poster and stand by it talking about the results. You learn a lot that way and gain some credibility with others who share your interests.
One step that can prevent amateurs (and sometimes academics!) from publishing is peer review. Any journal you hope to publish in will have some level of peer review. Even if your paper is great, the verdict will probably be āpublish with modifications.ā Oneās first reaction to the proposed changes is on the order of āYouāre damaging my precious baby!ā (How would I know??) Sometimes people give up at this point. Donāt. Be as upset as you need to be but then take a deep breath, make a copy of your document, and start making the changes the reviewers want. Make all the changes except the rare one that is wrong ā and if itās wrong because the reviewer misunderstood the paper, take that as a hint that clearer writing is needed. When Iāve done this, Iāve sometimes been amazed at what a good writer I am 
. When youāre done, resubmit the paper with cover letter that says you made all the changes the reviewers wanted except this one or these few. Explain why you didnāt make those changes. The fact that you did make most of the changes makes your objection to a few of them much more palatable to the editors.
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Can we do worthwhile science outside academia?
I would say, yes sure of course!
Michael Faraday (1791ā1867) in the age of 13 he quits school.
Humphry Davy (1778ā1829) autodidact
James Croll (1821ā1890) insurance agent
Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887ā1920) autodidact
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632ā1723) cloth seller
Benjamin Franklin (1706ā1790) autodidact
Gregor Mendel (1822ā1884) theology and philosophy but autodidact in biology
Nikola Tesla (1856ā1943) he did try but then the went autodidact
ā¦
They all became academics by academics, to honor the academia, even if many think its the other way, to honor them.
Just find or invent some thing that others dont, and they will come for you to get you into the club.
In the other hand, there are a lot of academic papers out there like ā¦
Is Wet Underwear Comfortable?
Jesus Potter Harry Christ: The Archetypes of Evil in Harry Potter
Behavioral Problems in Schools with an Odd Number of Rooms
Optimal Height of Pencil Sharpeners in Left-Handed Doors
The Metaphysics of Unicorns
Optimising Canned Cat Food for Humans
Grievance Studies Hoax Papers
Butt Breathing in Animals
Physics of Pasta Sauce Splatter
Duckās Echo Location
Banana Peeling Techniques
Chicken Plucking as Therapy
Can a Cat Be Both Pet and Friend?
The Sociology of Farting
Why Do We Laugh at Farts?
The Shape of an Egg
How to Tie Shoelaces
The Best Way to Eat a Sandwich
The Philosophy of PokƩmon
Why People Hate Clowns
Zombie Apocalypse Models
The Biology of Werewolves
Fairy Tale Linguistics
ā¦ so it seems as if you just need an idea that is stupid enough to get your self into academic science.
so what is about āHow many spiders are inhaled on average by snoring horses?ā, i think this is pretty unanswered until now. Do a study and may you will get an Nobel-Price.
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I donāt know if this is going to answer your question, but Iāll do my best. 
Colorado has two species of Argia that are darned near identical: the Vivid Dancer and the Springwater Dancerāwhich around here, does not usually occur in the lovely lavender-purple shade thatās depicted on the taxon page. Itās usually seen in the deep blue morph that makes it so visually similar to the Vivid Dancer. Hence, many of the Colorado observations are either stuck at genus level, or bumped to species with careful disclaimers about similarity, range ambiguity, and lack of records in a particular locale (usually for A. funebris).
There are some differences between the two that could possibly be used as field marks, except that thereās no data that I can find about what percentage of each popuation conforms to said differences. Also, as far as I can tell, the range maps havenāt been updated recently, so if an observer wants to have a conclusive ID, it requires in-hand, detailed photos.
Enter me, because Iām too stubborn to admit that some problems are above my pay grade. I didnāt finish my degree: my younger sisters were a higher priority. On the other hand, I read textbooks and scientific journals for fun. I also talk shop with The Doctor, who is a Ph.D. biostatistican. Short version: weāre working up a field study to figure out if there are sufficiently consistent field marks (wing length, body size, and such) to allow for a high ID confidence from non-in-hand photos. The null hypothesis is that there arenāt, but since the data set that Iām gathering requires detailed in-hand photos, it still generates an updated range map.
Despite the fact that D. is going to be doing the number crunching, this isnāt gathering data for a ārealā scientist. Somebody has to be out there doing measurements, estimating population densities, and scientific stuff like that. Thatās me. My biggest obstacle this summer is that fibromyalgia has been playing merry cob with my field time.
I guess what Iām getting at is that even charasmatic clades like Odonata have sizable holes in our understanding of their life cycles. Some 1700 species assessed as of 2022 donāt have enough information for the IUCN to assign a conservation status to them. @bugbaer mentioned the lack of information on microlepidopteran caterpillars and host plants. Bald Eagles have been intensively studued for decades, but itās only in the last couple of years that a paper was published on the high proportion of prairie dogs in the diet of Colorado populations. Is it because so many water sources in the state are heavily managed for recreation? The paper didnāt say, but it would be worth a follow-up study. There are always questions, and those questions need people like us to do the asking.
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In principle, you could provide academics good enough to be hired as scientists with a research stipend suited to their field and appointment level so they could spend their time doing science rather than writing balderdash that fits current funding fashions (and then putting the balderdash into practice if they are successful in getting dollars). But I mention this as a barrier to doing science inside academia: that is, to counter the point of the OP that the barriers exist primarily on the outside.
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? your doors have pencil sharpeners? How. Odd 
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It depends on what kind of science you want to do. People have provided multiple examples in this thread of studies that require very little in the way of funding; you mentioned one yourself ā raising caterpillars to learn about host plants of particular species.
I think part of the point above is that academic funding structures encourage certain types of research rather than others. It isnāt just that people spend a significant amount of time applying for grants, they also have to be doing the sort of projects that are eligible for receiving grants. At least in the US, grant money is often about more than the funds directly needed for equipment, material, etc. It is often connected with funding oneās own position and other running costs that would exist regardless of the proposed project. Being able to bring in money also often plays a role in how valuable you are considered to be for the department or how valuable the department is for the university, which in turn may affect things like tenure decisions. My impression is that there is a certain amount of pressure to conduct research that requires expensive equipment rather than research that requires nothing other than time and paying for research assistants, because the former are easier to justify in the cost structures allowed for in grant applications.
And both grant cycles and publication requirements encourage research that produces short-term deliverables. One result of this is that certain areas of investigation have tended to be neglected, in some cases to the degree that there is considerable concern about a shortage of expertise as older scientists retire with no young people taking their place. Among these areas are taxonomy and what is referred to here in Germany as floristics and faunistics, as well as other sorts of investigation that require long-term observation.
Some of your past posts hint that you have a certain amount of resentment about academia and academics as a result of experiences of exclusion and gatekeeping. I would gently suggest that focusing on this as an insider vs. outsider dichotomy is more harmful than helpful. As others have pointed out, academia today is broken in a number of ways, and people who earn their living doing science (whether in academia or in the private sector) are also subject to structural constraints and limitations, sometimes fairly significant ones, even if they are different in some ways from the limitations you will encounter as a non-academic.
All of this is an argument for collaboration and dialogue across such divides, for finding ways that these different positions can complement each other rather than being a source of conflict or resentment.
I will ask again: What would you consider a meaningful contribution to science? What do you want to accomplish that you feel you cannot currently do?
For myself ā admittedly as someone who never wanted to be a scientist in the first place and has been rather surprised to realize that identification keys and articles on bee biology have become a regular part of my leisure reading ā the answer is that I would like to feel like what I am doing makes a difference on a local level. There are a couple of implications for this: First, that sometimes, in order for certain finds to be recognized, I need to accommodate the requirements of state environmental protection agencies, such as collecting voucher specimens, however much I would prefer non-lethal forms of documentation. Second, that one important way I can contribute is through outreach, by talking to people about bees and showing them all the different species that can be found even in the middle of the city, and little things that they can do to create habitat for insects.
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