Citizen Science

My friend Tobi is a Master Gardener and a volunteer at the Harvest for the Hungry Garden in Santa Rosa. Her evacuation story involves, among other things, her travels around the county with ten chickens and a border collie in her car. Various community organizations are collaborating to collect samples from local farms and backyard gardens to study the impact of smoke pollution from recent fires on local produce so Tobi came by today to collect samples of kale and lettuce from our garden.

They will be examining:
     What, if any, air pollutants have been deposited on crops grown near recent fires?
     Can these pollutants be washed off, or are they absorbed into plant tissue?
     How much of these air pollutants might be ingested by those eating local produce?

Since we are lucky enough to still have a garden, we were more than happy for Tobi to come and take some samples. She washed some in a weak vinegar solution and left the others as picked. All the samples will be taken to a central location in Sebastopol and frozen. She took our GPS location for a map displaying all the samples and their distance from the fires. I had to laugh that she could get our GPS coordinates in an instant from her phone,  but there was still a pile of  good old fashioned paperwork before we could begin. At the top of the consent form was this disclaimer: 
Please note that this is a community-initiated and community-driven citizen science project and as such this consent form has not gone through an Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approval It was created by and for community members to help better provide information and gain clear consent for sampling.

Not entirely clear, but what it seems to be saying is that as a community we can get better results on our own than if we go through some institution three steps removed. By the time the consent form passed through some distant Institutional Review Board (whatever that is) we would be well into winter with no smoky crops left to be sampled....

OilMan came down from the garden yesterday with four green peppers which he is stuffing for our dinner tonight. I washed them but not with Tobi's vinegar solution. OilMan says stuffed bell peppers was one of his father's favorite meals but I'll bet his father didn't make his with possibly tainted green peppers. Having eaten them, perhaps we can report to the Citizen Science Research  Committee on the Potential Health Impacts of Air Pollution on Local Produce in Sonoma County,