Some expeditions are group efforts, but much of the data is collected by the lone hiker who pauses on the trail to inspect a plant, or the rower who stops to observe a pod of whales. Mr. Treinish said he started the program out of a sense that adventure for its own sake was a bit self-indulgent. Two of the world's top climbers, scaling Mount Everest, found the highest-altitude plant life ever recorded, a yet-to-be-named moss. Hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail in the West Coast are now collecting information on the pika, an alpine member of the rabbit family that is a valuable indicator species for climate change. The payoff for adventurers is the feeling of giving something back to their wild playgrounds. Researchers have found this new relationship a bit tricky. Yes, it saves scientists time and money to have volunteer eyes and data-gathering in out-of-the-way places. And many have come to see the collaboration as a way to inject some adrenaline and pizazz into often slow and painstaking work. But relying on data collected by neophytes for research that may be submitted for peer review can be risky. April Craighead, a wildlife biologist at the Craighead Institute, a conservation research group founded by her father-in-law in Bozeman, Mont., enlisted hikers to collect data for her work on the pika. Of the 40 or so who volunteered, she said, only a few followed through with usable observations. "It wasn't a pika, it was a ground squirrel," said Ms. Craighead, who plans to continue working with volunteers after making some tweaks to the process. Many parks, preserves and zoos have public outreach programs. Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation is a newer iteration of that model. Mr. Treinish started the group with a $250 donation, a cellphone and a lot of enthusiasm. He lives low on the nonprofit food chain, paying himself a minimum wage and taking in some extra money by working as an outdoor guide and lecturer. He sleeps in a shed behind a house he shares with roommates in Bozeman. His room in the house is stuffed with piles of camping gear. Growing up in Ohio, Mr. Treinish said, he was a bit of a troublemaker, and, as an intervention, his family shipped him off to British Columbia for a monthlong wilderness program that he credits with changing his life. Today, the telephone is married to his ear as he lines up new projects: a trip for high school students to assess salmon habitats in Oregon, the development of data-collection protocols for Arctic rowers and the deployment of scuba divers along the entire length of the California coast to sample the water for plastic contamination. Russell Hopcroft, a professor of marine life at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, sees the beauty and the thrift in linking his studies of the health of zooplankton, a major food source for fish, to a monthlong expedition being led by Paul Ridley, a Chicagoan who plans to row a 29-foot boat 1,100 miles across the Arctic Ocean with three companions this summer. Chartering a research vessel can cost more than $50,000 a day, Dr. Hopcroft said. "This is an incredible buy if they're able to get some useful science done at the same time," he added. Strapped to their boats will be a zooplankton dragnet, a sampling container and observational equipment. "They'll be covering a big chunk of ocean, and there are things that we don't learn from a satellite," he said. People are going to see this as having that edge to it, and you don't get that with your science very often. Mr. Ridley, 28, has also agreed to record whale sightings during the journey - another match made by Mr. Treinish. Steve Gehman, a biologist who founded Wild Things Unlimited, a nonprofit research group focusing on "rare carnivores" in the Rockies, has high hopes for the volunteer wolverine trackers. Wolverines number fewer than 500 in the lower 48 states. They are known to ramble for hundreds of square miles over rugged and remote terrain in search of food and mates, which makes studying them arduous and expensive. The value of the amateur research becomes more important as science budgets dwindle, said Pat Shanley, a biologist for the Helena National Forest, who relies on the data. A few weeks after the first expedition, Ms. Nunlist returned to the forest with Mr. Gehman. Snow had lured her friends out for more skiing, but she was happy to be tracking wolverines again, and, despite the snow cover, she found more scat and hair samples. "I have my whole life to ski," she said. It's a unique opportunity to go tracking, one that doesn't come around every day.