Citizen Science
My goal with Citizen Science is to assemble a comprehensive suite of data gathering tools, educational materials, and children’s activities to promote involvement of the public in professional research carried out at a continental scale and to increase understanding of science and conservation.
Overview
The geographic scale at which we operate citizen science at Cornell Lab of Ornithology means that virtually all of our projects are internet-based and involve partnership with Information Science in innovative tool development. If designed well, the suite of monitoring tools can be harnessed to address significant bird conservation problems as they arise and to promote geographically expansive observational and experimental research. As such, the tools must be flexible enough to allow rapid development of new protocols and they must become increasingly rigorous in terms of ability to address major issues of data bias, detection probability, and sampling error. An example of harnessing of existing tools to test specific hypotheses with observational data is found in MyYardCounts, a new project using the eBird checklist tool to examine backyard biodiversity. Another is Personality Profiles, which is explicitly experimental and has led several participants to exclaim, “Before I did this experiment, I thought I knew my birds!”
Project Development
In developing projects, citizen science program staff constantly face the tension between the optimal data collection protocols and what we can realistically expect participants to contribute. My own field research has always involved controlled experiments and I am excited to bring the experimental method into citizen science, because I believe it can take a relatively simple data collection scheme to new levels in terms of the strength of scientific inference that is possible. The experimental method is also a powerful teaching tool, and has considerable potential to help free choice learners develop critical thinking skills that will improve their abilities to understand and evaluate scientific information. The Personality Profiles project is a self-paired controlled experiment, which tests the power of using the experimental method in citizen science research.
Future
What excites me most about this work is the coupling of scientific opportunity with the practice of tracking human dimensions via rigorous evaluation to maximize the educational and behavioral impacts. Our different citizen science projects have distinct audiences and, using contemporary models from Cornell Cooperative Extension, we view our participants as stakeholders and revise project recruitment strategies according to what we learn about our audience from outside, professional evaluation. We have begun to explore the possibility of using animal behavior to attract participants into citizen science research and education projects. The popular media often focuses on animal behavior because it is intrinsically engaging. By creating projects that involve behavioral observation, we believe we can simultaneously increase enjoyment of the projects and teach major concepts of ecology, evolution, and conservation all the while collecting interesting data for publication!
Most importantly, the wide variety of recruitment strategies we use is designed to increase diversity, increase participant numbers, and fill the gaps in our data, particularly in less inhabited regions of the west. Our goal is to turn citizen science into a continent-wide adaptive management tool. This tool will be most effective in residential landscapes where the importance of habitat quality to biodiversity is in need of further research.
Because our citizen science projects are large and increase in scientific value with increased participation over the long-term, sustainability is one of the primary challenges we face. We use a combination of grant-writing, development, and marketing strategies to increase recruitment and sustain the projects.
Citizen Science is supported by:
The Arthur A. Allen Director of Citizen Science Endowment
The Adelson Family Fund for Citizen Science
The National Science Foundation
The Wallace Genetic Foundation
Citizen Science Program Staff
For staff information follow the links below, or see the Citizen Science Project Pages above:
David Bonter, Project Leader, FeederWatch
Caren Cooper, Research Associate
Kitty Gifford, Project Assistant, NestWatch
Anne Marie Johnson, Project Assistant, FeederWatch
Genna Knight, Project Assistant FeederWatch
Michal Kuklis, Application Developer
Chris Marx, Application Developer
Tina Phillips,, Project Leader, NestWatch
Patty Porupski, Administrative Assistant
Karen Purcell, Project Leader, Urban Bird Studies
Sarah Seroussi, Web Designer
Christianne White, Project Assistant, Celebrate Urban Birds and FeederWatch
Past lab members:
Megan Whitman, Promoted to Project Leader, Home Study Course
