Pikas in the Pacific Northwest, kiss your privacy goodbye. This spring, Gregg Treinish, wildlife biologist, founder, and director of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC), recruited 22 hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail from Campo, California, to Manning Park, British Columbia, to spy on the small, furry mammals. The hikers are recording pika signtings, straw nests, and even urine stains as part ot a pilot project to tracK tne impacts ot climate change on the creatures. Recruiting passersby for research is a time-honored tradition: Psychologists designing an experiment often grab stray students for a quick, cheap pilot study before shooting for the big bucks. Treinish wants to apply the same principle to ecological studies: the nonprofit ACS, founded in November 2010, seeks to connect scientists with far-ranging adventurers for "model expeditions that could be repeated on a widespread scale," he says. Researchers are already using his matchmaking to recruit intrepid explorers to catalog the presence of ice worms in glaciers or record grizzly movements near Yellowstone National Park. "There's no project too big or too small," Treinish says.
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