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Effective conservation aims to integrate, rather than compete, with the needs of the human communities that share the landscape with biological communities. This chapter includes tips for planning, implementing, and evaluating techniques to connect classrooms and communities with conservation. Conservation education techniques, such as service-learning, issue investigation, and project-based learning involve students, teachers, and community members in finding creative approaches to issues, such as backyard habitat restoration and solid waste management. Community-based research, citizen science, and mapping are techniques developed to work with students and adult learners. The techniques described in this chapter bring real conservation issues to the forefront of communities and classrooms, and ultimately help achieve conservation goals.

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.

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of citizen science as a tool for undertaking ecological research. Before assessing the potential for large-scale citizen science to advance our understanding of ecological systems, the chapter considers the types of ecological research questions for which the scale (extent and resolution) of data from citizen science is particularly suitable. It then provides examples that illustrate how citizen science data can elucidate some of the processes relating to ecology, such as the underlying patterns of an organism's distribution and abundance as well as its life history and behavior. It also outlines research considerations that must be taken into account when designing (or continuing) citizen science projects.

The author argues that there is a growing capacity in the social sciences to include people not as subjects but as active participants in research. This approach has a complex history in the social sciences that needs to be understood, but it is emerging in a modern from as a viable technique for discovery, especially among hard-to-reach groups. Examples of citizen science will be presented and the strengths and weaknesses of the technique explored.

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 focuses on Internet-based social networking and collective action models of citizen science. More specifically, it explores the potential of collective action and social networking theory to improve project designs and thus extend impacts beyond the traditional program goals. The chapter first explains how citizen science functions as a collective action and goes on to discuss social and psychological considerations in collective action, how people participate in citizen science collective actions, and possible effects of enhancing the number of connections across large distances. It then considers the influence of leadership and other social factors on the diffusion of cooperation in social networks, how the impacts of such networks can be investigated, and the use of Internet-based social media to understand how people participate in citizen science. It also examines how social networking can be expected to enhance educational outcomes and concludes by suggesting directions for future research.

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 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.

The chapter reviews literature in social movement studies on resource mobilization, mobilizing structures, and organizations, then it examines a parallel literature in science and technology studies on networks. It suggests a way to build on these literatures by analyzing the organizational dimension of counterpublic knowledge, and it argues that three are four main types of organizational forms. Scientific and intellectual movements involve attempts to reform research agendas within the scientific field; science associations and public interest science organizations involve means by which scientists communicate with the public and political field; citizen-science alliances involve collaborative projects between citizen groups and scientists; and citizen science involves research projects by lay communities.

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 the connection between citizen science and landscape ecology and how it can widen the circle of scientific research across space and time. It first explains how citizen science can be used to test many pertinent hypotheses regarding the cause and biological consequences of habitat loss and fragmentation. It then looks at past uses of citizen science to investigate the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation and goes on to discuss how citizen science can be employed to answer questions in landscape ecology, such as combining citizen science data with environmental data of an appropriate spatial extent and resolution.

This book concludes with an afterword that reiterates the important role of citizen science in fostering individual inquiry. It describes citizen science as an extraordinary new stage in democratizing the organization of human curiosity, citing the explosion of local, regional, and globally scaled citizen science projects as one of the most profoundly important social consequences of the development of the Internet. It also takes note of the fact that the environmental sciences have taken the lead in developing the approaches and technologies required of citizen science. Finally, it discusses some of the challenges facing citizen science and emphasizes the power of citizen science projects to provide solutions to a host of global problems in the twenty-first century, including climate change.

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 discusses cognitive considerations that need to be taken into account in the development of citizen science projects. It first looks at a research project with combined research and educational goals, called Spotting the Weedy Invasives, using it to highlight the potential benefits of using a learning sciences approach in the development of citizen science training and educational programs. It then examines issues related to both data quality and learning gains, including cognitive processes and the potential for cognitive bias. It emphasizes the importance of aligning research goals with attributes of participants and how cognitive biases may affect the quality of citizen science data. The chapter concludes with an assessment of what the project design and results it describes might mean for the design of larger, Internet-based, geographically dispersed citizen science initiatives.

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 examines how citizen science can contribute to community resilience in situations of human vulnerability within the context of civic ecology. Drawing from the disaster, conflict, natural resource management, and resilience literatures, and from examples of participatory data collection linked with environmental restoration in postcrisis settings, the chapter considers how we might integrate concepts from citizen science with scholarship and practice aimed at fostering community capacity to buffer the impacts of disasters and conflicts. It argues that citizen science can play an important role in conflict management and disaster recovery, in part by accumulating multiple forms of knowledge and data collection over broad geographic areas.

This chapter examines opportunities to engage people with nature while collecting research-grade data through biodiversity discovery activities in parks. After briefly discussing the growth of citizen science, we examine the largest, organized citizen science event occurring in parks, the BioBlitz, which features direct engagement of scientists with the public. A BioBlitz is an intensive field study that attempts to inventory all species or particular taxa in a park or protected area, typically within a 24-hour period. Since the first BioBlitz in 1996, they have been conducted in 119 national park units and a dozen countries, with over 30 events occurring annually. Species new to park inventories are often identified and occasionally species that are new to science have been discovered. An important outcome of biodiversity discovery is bringing nature to children and adults in a way that has lasting impact and encourages the need to nurture and protect nature, even in their own backyard. We discuss the communication and analytical skills that professional scientists need to work successfully with citizen science. The ubiquitous use of cell phone and similar handheld technology that is often blamed for deteriorating a child’s connection with nature may also provide an opportunity to reinvent it.

This chapter focuses on the connection between children and nature and how this connection relates to citizen science outcomes. It reviews the literature to find evidence concerning the short-term impacts of children's nature experiences, and especially whether nature activities affect children's short-term environmental attitudes and behaviors, as well as the correlation between childhood nature experiences and later life outcomes. The findings are summarized and the strength of the evidence provided by the extant research is assessed. The chapter concludes by suggesting directions and strategies for future research, paying particular attention to the causal association between environmental education or citizen science projects and participants' environmental attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes of interest.

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.