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National Citizen Science Day

Derya Akkaynak, an MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student, was with a group of divers watching two dozen manta rays off Kona, Hawaii, when she had an epiphany: all around her, on her companions’ dive computers, was a rich source of untapped ocean temperature data. When she returned to her hotel, Akkaynak began laying plans to reach out to the estimated 10 million divers worldwide to contribute their data to a new citizen science effort. Citizen science—using non-scientists to gather or analyze data and observations—is an increasingly common way to distribute among large numbers of people tasks that would be difficult or impossible for a single scientist to perform. (Photo by Camrin Braun, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)