Citizen Science

Public Participation in Environmental Research

Janis L. Dickinson, Richard E. Bonney, Janis L. Dickinson, Richard E. Bonney, Jr.

• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801464423
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Citizen science enlists members of the public to make and record useful observations, such as counting birds in their backyards, watching for the first budding leaf in spring, or measuring local snowfall. The large numbers of volunteers who participate in projects such as Project FeederWatch or Project BudBurst collect valuable research data, which, when pooled together, create an enormous body of scientific data on a vast geographic scale. In return, such projects aim to increase participants' connections to science, place, and nature, while supporting science literacy and environmental stewardship. In Citizen Science, experts from a variety of disciplines—including scientists and education specialists working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where many large citizen science programs use birds as proxies for biodiversity—share their experiences of creating and implementing successful citizen science projects, primarily those that use massive data sets gathered by citizen scientists to better understand the impact of environmental change.

This first and foundational book for this developing field of inquiry addresses basic aspects of how to conduct citizen science projects, including goal-setting, program design, and evaluation, as well as the nuances of creating a robust digital infrastructure and recruiting a large participant base through communications and marketing. An overview of the types of research approaches and techniques demonstrates how to make use of large data sets arising from citizen science projects. A final section focuses on citizen science's impacts and its broad connections to understanding the human dimensions and educational aspects of participation. Citizen Science teaches teams of program developers and researchers how to cross the bridge from success at public engagement to using citizen science data to understand patterns and trends or to test hypotheses about how ecological processes respond to change at large geographic scales. Intended as a resource for a broad audience of experts and practitioners in natural sciences, information science, and social sciences, this book can be used to better understand how to improve existing programs, develop new ones, and make better use of the data resources that have accumulated from citizen science efforts. Its focus on harnessing the impact of "crowdsourcing" for scientific and educational endeavors is applicable to a wide range of fields, especially those that touch on the importance of massive collaboration aimed at understanding and conserving what we can of the natural world.

PART I

THE PRACTICE OF CITIZEN SCIENCE

Developing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of citizen science projects is a complex endeavor. How can projects be designed to accommodate potentially competing goals and objectives for research, conservation, and education? How can projects be organized at the vast geographic scales necessary for understanding environmental problems that stretch across continents and around the globe? How do we ensure data integrity and quality data analyses? Given our goal of large geographic coverage and repeated observations at the same site, how do we recruit and train large numbers of participants to donate their time to participate in essentially altruistic endeavors? And how can we measure the impacts of citizen science, both for project participants and for society as a whole? The first section of this book tackles the overarching challenge of project design, implementation, and assessment by tapping into the expertise of practitioners who have been building citizen science projects and tools for many years.

Chapter 1 by Bonney and Dickinson is an overview of citizen science project development that focuses on the strategies that have evolved over the years at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (Bonney, Cooper, et al. 2009). The Cornell Lab’s approach to citizen science is to develop a spectrum of projects on birds that balance our goals of conservation research, science education—including reaching out to diverse audiences—and stewardship. The model describes the steps and stages that must be considered when developing a project to produce robust outcomes for research and education.

To help the program model come alive, Chapter 2 describes four ongoing citizen science projects developed at Cornell and beyond. The four case studies explore projects that have been designed with unique scientific goals, educational objectives, and intended audiences, and which are carried out at varying scales and levels of complexity. Two of the projects (FeederWatch and Neighborhood Nestwatch) focus on birds, which are charismatic and set a high bar in terms of project potential, with respect to both the quality of data that can be gathered by talented amateurs and the number of participants who stand ready to be recruited. Along with reef fish and celestial objects, birds may be one of the few targets for which the data-collection skills of amateurs outpace, or at least compare favorably with, those of professionals. This chapter also highlights successful projects from the world of plant phenology (Project BudBurst) and insect ecology (Monarch Larva Monitoring Project).

The changing technological landscape continues to present new possibilities as well as challenges for project developers. In Chapter 3, Kelling explains the practical aspects of creating a sound cyberinfrastructure to serve as a backbone for large-scale citizen science project development. In the process he describes an array of strategies for creating novel and enduring applications to deliver citizen science and its data to project participants, professional scientists, and managers over the World Wide Web. The strategies include recent improvements in Web application design for interactive maps, graphing, and online data analysis tools.

While birds can be considered charismatic, charisma is not necessarily required for success, for we have seen successful new citizen science projects focused on species like grunions (Grunion Greeter, grunion.org) and earthworms (The Great Lakes WormWatch, greatlakeswormwatch.org). And even though birds are charismatic, Cornell’s bird projects, with just 200,000 participants, have recruited only a small percentage of the estimated 46 to 70 million birders in North America (Cordell 2004; USFWS 2002). This suggests that the outreach potential, even for birds, may be much greater than current project strategies achieve. We still have much to learn about recruitment of participants.

Successful implementation, maintenance, and growth of citizen science projects cannot be accomplished without expertise on “getting the word out.” In Chapter 4, Chu et al. examine insights that have arisen during fifteen years of marketing and communicating about citizen science projects based at Cornell. The critical issue of project sustainability must be considered even during project development, because although the scientific value of projects increases with project duration, sponsors typically fund new projects rather than ongoing ones. What’s more, scientific funding clusters are just beginning to see citizen science as a serious and fundable research endeavor. Therefore, sustaining projects requires tapping into a variety of funding opportunities focused on educational, cyberinfrastructure, computational, conservation, social networking, and even environmental psychology research. This chapter provides ideas for practitioners and institutional directors facing the sustainability challenge.

In the final chapter of this section Phillips et al. focus on citizen science program evaluation (Chapter 5). Because many citizen science projects are designed with specific educational objectives, we are concerned about the lag in research required to understand project impacts within the context of these goals. Do individuals feel more empowered to evaluate scientific information or to make science-based choices as a consequence of participating in citizen science? When individuals are exposed to citizen science experiences through an organization, rather than of their own volition, do they emerge from the experience with new ideas about themselves as scientists or about the value of science to society? This chapter reviews recent progress made in the evaluation of informal science education projects and defines expected outcomes, setting the stage for future evaluation and assessment research.

1

Overview of Citizen Science

RICK BONNEY AND JANIS L. DICKINSON

While the term “citizen science” may be relatively new, the idea that any person can participate in scientific research—regardless of background, formal training, or political persuasion—is as old as Aristotle. After all, scientific knowledge is largely derived from observation, experimentation, and analysis, which most people are capable of, at least at a basic level. Basic scientific observations, such as kinds, numbers, and locations of plants and animals, can be made and recorded by anyone who carefully examines the world around them. Furthermore, such observations can lead naturally to new discoveries, insights, and questions. Participants in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch, for instance, were the first to report the emergence of a disease (conjunctivitis) that eventually spread throughout the House Finch population in the eastern United States and caused a significant decline in House Finch populations (see Chapter 2).

Whereas many projects now involve the public in various aspects of scientific inquiry, the projects in this book generally follow the model for large-scale, Internet-based project development and implementation developed at the Cornell Lab over the last two decades and refined at a conference of citizen science practitioners who gathered at the Lab in June 2007 (Bonney, Cooper, et al. 2009). The model differs from earlier approaches (e.g., Dunn et al. 2006) in focusing on geographic extent of data collection and taking a cross-disciplinary approach to program development by assembling teams to work at the interface of education, environmental biology, social science, geospatial statistics, evaluation research, marketing, communications, and information science. Such teams then develop and implement protocols for rigorous data collection and submission that will engage motivated individuals who may or may not be formally trained in natural history observation (e.g., bird-watching) or scientific investigation. The model is highlighted by the NSF-sponsored Citizen Science Toolkit website (www.citizenscience.org), which was developed after the 2007 conference, and this model of citizen science is expanding continually as new ideas, insights, and tools are added by the burgeoning citizen science community.

Environmentally focused citizen science projects ask people to observe and collect data about plants and animals and to submit their data to centralized databases. Projects have been developed to study animal migrations, bird nesting behavior, populations of fish around coral reefs, breeding behavior of grunions on California beaches, and even earthworms around the Great Lakes (see project listing at www.citizenscience.org and table describing the primary bird monitoring projects in Dickinson et al. 2010). Typically projects are developed and managed by universities, museums, or environmental/natural history organizations with a direct interest in using the data for research, such as the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University (the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network), the Boston Museum of Science (Firefly Watch), and the National Audubon Society (Christmas Bird Count). The project team develops and supplies project instructions, data sheets, and generally a website for reporting observations.

Project participants range in age from young students to senior citizens and come from varied backgrounds. What they have in common is a strong interest in the organisms being studied, a curiosity about the world around them, and a desire to advance the field of science. Many participants learn a lot about scientific investigation through their data collection endeavors, and some go on to conduct their own studies and data analyses. According to Karen Oberhauser, director of the Monarch Larvae Monitoring Project, many children who find and count monarch caterpillars experience what she calls “science bonding” and go on to conduct experiments about the relationships between monarchs and their host plants, the milkweeds.

As participants in citizen science projects submit data to project databases, scientists at the sponsoring institutions (or their partners) analyze the accumulating information and report findings on project websites and in popular and scientific publications. Vetting, cleaning, and analyzing the massive databases that result from large projects is a complex job and requires substantial training in statistical analysis and informatics. However, the payoff can be huge as the data reveal environmental patterns and processes that can be understood only through data collected across large geographic areas and over long periods of time. For example, citizen science data are now revealing northern range shifts in a variety of species as an apparent result of global climate change (Root 1988; Zuckerberg, Woods, et al. 2009).

Despite the apparent simplicity of the citizen science concept, developing, implementing, and assessing the impacts of public participation in research is in truth a complex and exacting process. To be successful in achieving simultaneous objectives in research, conservation, and education, the project team must plan protocols, recruit participants, manage data, disseminate results, and evaluate outcomes in a deliberate manner. In addition, because most large-scale projects are now delivered online, their development requires careful attention to best practices in website development and management. In the next section we present an overview of citizen science project design. For detailed treatment, see the resource list in the Citizen Science Toolkit at www.citizenscience.org.

Overview of Project Design Considerations

Choosing a Scientific Question

Citizen science projects are ideally driven by a research question or monitoring agenda that fits clearly within the sponsor’s scientific or conservation mission. Although a project’s main goal might be education, participants need to know that they are participating in “real” science research that will lead to analysis and publication in order to reap the educational benefits of their participation. When choosing questions, project developers must consider that many participants will be amateur observers, at least at first. Therefore, monitoring studies for which data collection relies on basic observation skills, such as counting the numbers of birds at a feeder or locating invasive plants, are the easiest to develop into large-scale citizen science efforts. However, citizen science can involve complex designs and even experiments if developed with continual audience testing and feedback. For example, participants in the Cornell Lab’s Birds in Forested Landscapes project select survey sites, describe site habitats, and use playbacks of recorded songs to locate and map breeding birds (see Chapter 9).

Forming a Project Team

In most cases it is necessary to have funding in place prior to initiating a large-scale citizen science project. Citizen science projects with many complementary goals and objectives require a team of developers with varied expertise to be successful. As illustrated by the wide-ranging backgrounds of the contributors to this book, many large-scale citizen science efforts involve scientific researchers, formal and informal science educators, computational statisticians, social scientists, and evaluators to help set learning goals and define intended project outcomes. Of course not all institutions and sponsoring organizations employ individuals with all of the required expertise, which is why so many projects represent collaborations and partnerships among complementary organizations or institutions. Organizations that do not have an explicit plan for scientific research are unlikely to be able to fulfill their obligation to participants to actually use the data. Significant groundwork has been laid regarding how a team might develop detailed scientific goals and methodologies to the benefit of the research effort (Dunn et al. 2006; see also Chapter 10 for an excellent example of this).

Developing and Refining Project Materials

The success of citizen science projects hinges largely on the quality, utility, and flexibility of their support materials, including project protocols, data forms, and educational resources. New, Web-based projects may successfully meet these requirements in part by engaging a knowledgeable user community. User support must be clear, intuitive, and tested repeatedly with the target audience to ensure that accurate data will be collected and submitted and that participants will learn from the process. Even so, there is often an experience effect, wherein data become more usable after participants have had a practice year (see Chapter 6).

Project protocols...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Why Citizen Science?
• PART I THE PRACTICE OF CITIZEN SCIENCE
• PART II IMPACTS OF CITIZEN SCIENCE ON CONSERVATION RESEARCH
• PART III EDUCATIONAL, SOCIAL, AND BEHAVIORAL ASPECTS OF CITIZEN SCIENCE
• Afterword
• Literature Cited