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This chapter examines strategies for recruiting and retaining participants in national citizen science projects based on insights that have emerged during fifteen years of marketing and communicating such initiatives at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It stresses the importance of understanding participant motivations and designing projects to appeal to targeted groups. It also discusses ways of publicizing citizen science projects through national and local media campaigns, Web communications, and engagement of volunteer “ambassadors.” Finally, it considers how project participants and program staff broaden and deepen their relationships with one another through online communities and on-the-ground community involvement. Three case studies are presented to demonstrate the importance of participant engagement in citizen science: the eBird project, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and the Celebrate Urban Birds project.

This chapter explains how citizen science can be used to develop a conservation research program. It describes a specific case in which “super citizen scientists” used manipulative sampling to gather data implicating acid rain and mercury in forest bird declines, highlighting the advantages of partnerships with governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Focusing on the Birds in Forested Landscapes (BFL) project that was originally developed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the chapter demonstrates how citizen data can help address the effects of pollution on birds over wide regions. It also considers the BFL's collaboration with The Nature Conservancy as well as new research using data from another citizen science project, the Breeding Bird Survey, to develop a program for investigating significant conservation issues for birds and for translating science for policy and management.

This chapter examines four citizen science projects launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and other organizations. The projects have been designed with unique scientific goals, educational objectives, and intended audiences, and carried out at varying scales and levels of complexity. Two of the projects are Project FeederWatch and Neighborhood Nestwatch, which focus on birds, while the other two, Project BudBurst and Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, deal with plant phenology and insect ecology, respectively. This chapter provides an overview of project design, participant interaction, training and educational resources, data collection and validation, impacts, and sustainability. It also discusses some of the lessons that can be drawn from each initiative.

This chapter focuses on citizen science program evaluation in informal settings. It first considers the historic rationale for evidence-based educational research before presenting a working matrix, modified from an evaluation framework developed in 2008 under the auspices of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for assessing the educational impacts of citizen science and other public participation in scientific research projects. It explains the theoretical basis of the matrix and illustrates its use with an example from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's NestWatch program. The chapter concludes with recommendations for developing systematic evaluations of citizen science and other forms of public participation in scientific research. These ideas are also intended to help guide overall thinking about evaluation design and instruments.

This chapter discusses the importance of audience diversification and the removal of barriers to citizen science participation by underserved audiences. More specifically, it explores ways to achieve an equitable representation of all audiences in citizen science in general and birding in particular. To make its case, the chapter looks at Celebrate Urban Birds, a citizen science project developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2007, to highlight strategies for including audiences who may not have had opportunities to connect with nature or to see themselves as science participants. Celebrate Urban Birds demonstrates the potential of citizen science to promote inclusion in nature study and to raise awareness and interest in biodiversity and environmental science.

Amateur ornithologists, such as birdwatchers, nest monitors, and ringers, have been, and will continue to be, key resources for ornithological research. These so-called citizen scientists significantly advance research by contributing to widely distributed and local projects and museum collections. This chapter reviews studies and discoveries related to avian reproduction that were made possible by citizen scientists. The studies span the use of historic collections of nests and eggs, as well as nest monitoring schemes, with a focus on those by the British Trust for Ornithology and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Volunteer observations have contributed to our understanding of natural history, brood parasitism, nesting phenology, difficult-to-detect phenomena, geographic and temporal patterns in clutch size and productivity, behavioural ecology, breeding distributions, population modelling, frequency of breeding attempts, and post-fledging survival. The chapter concludes with issues related to new frontiers at the intersection of citizen science practice and avian reproduction.

This chapter examines how bioinformatics can be used to advance citizen science engagement opportunities that provide the framework for research, education, and dissemination of information at global scales. It discusses the practical aspects of creating a sound cyberinfrastructure that will serve as the foundation for developing large-scale citizen science projects. It also considers various strategies for creating novel and enduring applications for delivering citizen science and its data to project participants, professional scientists, and managers over the Internet. Finally, it describes techniques for data management and archiving and explains how the Cornell Lab of Ornithology makes data discoverable via metadata. The chapter provides examples of how bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure resources make it possible for contributors to explore, synthesize, and visualize citizen science data and for professional scientists to carry out complex analyses on the same data sets.

This chapter explains how citizen science can foster true inquiry in the classroom, with particular emphasis on K–12 education. It considers how citizen science can be used by teachers to help their students pose their own questions, thus bringing personal relevance and meaning to student research, inspiring interest and motivation to learn. It also discusses curricular support for inquiry in citizen science, citing as an example the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's BirdSleuth curriculum that was designed to support student participation in citizen science projects. Finally, it describes a range of materials and opportunities provided by citizen science projects in support of inquiry-based learning, including data displays and analysis tools, teacher professional development, and mentoring by scientists.

This chapter describes the rapid decline of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to apparent extinction in the last decades of the 19th and first decades of the 20th centuries. The discovery of a remnant population of ivorybills in the Singer Tract in Louisiana in 1932 is described, and James Tanner is introduced as the ornithologist who conducted the only detailed study of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The chapter ends with the 2005 announcement of the discovery of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas.

This chapter presents an overview of citizen science, which is founded on the idea that anyone—regardless of background, formal training, or political persuasion—can participate in scientific research. The citizen science projects described in this book generally follow the model for large-scale, Internet-based project development and implementation developed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology over the last two decades. What sets this model apart from earlier approaches is its focus on the geographic extent of data collection and its cross-disciplinary approach to program development: it combines environmental biology and social science, education, geospatial statistics, evaluation research, marketing, communications, and information science. This chapter discusses the steps involved in citizen science project development, including data analysis and interpretation, dissemination of results, and measurement of project outputs and outcomes.

This book examines citizen science in the context of the Internet's impact on environmental science, focusing on large citizen science projects that involve monitoring biological and environmental change over broad geographic regions. It discusses the potential of citizen science as a way to study the natural world on broad geographic scales, along with the critical scientific perspectives and tools required to conduct large-scale citizen science research. It also highlights the areas of human endeavor and research that have been integrated with and continue to be influenced by citizen science, especially education. This introduction provides a brief history of citizen science and public participation in citizen science projects, along with an overview of the strategies that have evolved over the years at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with respect to citizen science, and particularly its projects on birds.