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June 24, 2007

Citizen Science Toolkit Conference

Attending the Citizen Science Toolkit Conference was an amazing experience. It was a lot of fun to be with such a smart, energetic group of people for three and a half days at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. There are amazing projects and people doing amazing things out there! Thanks to the CLO staff for getting the funding to host the conference and bringing us all in for it!

I have a Flickr set of photos from the conference (and these have been added to the new Citizen Science Group on Flickr as well).

Here are my very rough notes from the conference. I didn't take notes on every session, and what I got down mostly depended on what interested me and how well I could keep up with the speakers...so they got much less detailed as the conference went on. The conference proceedings should have much more info.

I'd love it if other attendees could add their own comments and observations here! And please join the citizen science social network so we can stay in touch with each other!

Conference Notes

During the opening remarks, Janis Dickinson, Director of Citizen Science at CLO, noted that there seemed to be three main shared values among attendees:

• A love for and awe of the natural world
• An interest in life-long ducation
• A belief that the cumulative effects of many is a powerful vehicle for change

Rick Bonney, Director of Program Development and Evaluation, pointed out that CLO was not the first to establish the practice of citizen science, but their foundational contribution may have been that they were the first to figure out how to write successful proposals to get grants for citizen science projects from NSF. He also mentioned that CLO is interested in ways to reach out to the greater community, particularly those who could come to this conference, through web casts and other online ways. (About half of those who applied to come to the conference were accepted.)

Sam Droege, Biologist at USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, gave a talk titled Just because you paid them doesn’t mean their data are better. One concept I liked about his talk is that they don't feel bad about throwing out data...on Frogwatch, a program he developed, they do a lot to get families out making observations. But if the data isn't high-quality (based on a number of things, including quizzes), they don't use it for science. He also spoke to the need for haivng personal contact with volunteers, not just communicating with them in aggregate, and even summarizing personal data results if possible. Volunteers that stay around for years can contribute to consistency in the data perhaps more than employees or contractors that come and go, and can lend maturity.

Droege talked about some of the roots of citizen science, and had stories of early efforts. Lighthouse surveys are one of the earliest in the birding world. Large numbers of birds would collide with the lighthouses and die, so the keepers were asked to track the dead birds. A review of the records shows the same kinds of problems that modern citizen science projects have...letters from participants asking, "why are we doing this?" and data quality ranging from very detailed to "yellow bird".

Another early project was Migration Record Schemes, by Wells Cook, who may have gotten the idea from Europe. This project ran from the 1880's thru WW II and to a lesser extend into the 1950's, comprised of 8 million records, with 3000 volunteers during some years.

Hunter success surveys are another source of early records, and continue up through today. Hunters are registered with permits, and the government asks them to keep a diary of what they shoot...there's about a 60% response rate, simply from asking. Other programs asking them to send in wings or tails for refined identification also see about a 60% success rate, even though this is a group that's typically skeptical of government (I'm not sure of that...many of them are IN government...). However, the point is made...if you can get a 60% response rate from hunters just by asking. ("If hunters can do it...well, I'm not goint to get into the caveman thing..." <laughter>)

Breeding bird surveys (BBS) also collect immense amounts of data and have been going on for years. Costs about $900 per species/year, 4.2 million records, over 40 years, 10,500 observers, nnnual 29,000 hours, equivalent to 15 FTE's (Full time employees?) and 150,000 annual miles (other participants correctly noted that this is not "free" equivalent to FTE's!). Observer retention averages a tenth of a lifetime, 8 years. Reasons for leaving include hearing loss...and maybe some should leave do to this, but they don't want to.

Droege asserts that money managing volunteers has a higher yield than money spent on technicians. He also talked about monitoring vs. research, saying that research questions usually can be answered at any point, but that a year lost monitoring is a year that can never be regained. Also that monitoring data is a permanent contribution, used over and over, increases in value with age (single data point is used over and over again). (I'm not sure these distinctions are all that useful, but maybe that's my lack of experience.)

Droege also encouraged use to think about what ecological info we need. The data is currently using the data to drive conservation. Conservation may need to drive choices in data to collect...for example, we don't have data on bee population status to look back at now. He suggested these areas of investigation because of their ecological impact: crickets/katydids, ladybugs, mushrooms, worms and isopods, ants, pop and carrion beetles.

Suggested web sites for further investigation:

Managers' Monitoring Guide: How to Design a Wildlife Monitoring Program

Discover Life

Tina Phillips: NestWatch: InterSECTion of Science, Education, Conservation, and Technology

Images are what captivate people; love of science often started with watching something. "If you can get them to wonder, you can get them interested in science."

Defines Citizen Science as "A partnership between the public and professional scientist that relies on large-scale observations collected across time and space."

40 articles in scientific journals based on citizen-collected data

Virtual Nest Watch launching next year (pilot this year): tagging photos; looking for learning behaviors.

Michelle Prysby: Biodiversity Inventories and Beyond: Bringing Scientists and Communities Together

Virginia "master naturalist" program

Also talks about monitoring vs. research and adds a third type: inventory.

Inventories: bio-blitzes, naturemapping (gap analysis) opportunistically recording flora and fauna w/spatial data, all taxa biodiversity inventories

All taxa inventory happening various places - great smokey mtn is initially, point reyes is noted on the map as one

ATBI (All Taxa Biological Inventory)

Volunteers vs. citizen scientists: Some of these tasks alone aren't citizen science (biological illustrations of new species is one role they have for volunteers)

Moth project that used a light trap to send moths into a room fridge (so don't kill them, national park rules), put into petri dish, then identify usng a reference collection and field guides. (GREAT DIY project!) looks like they did do the pinning of new species they found (Thought this was weird...rare species is killed while common ones set free, does this have greater affect eg. are they saving the common ones and killing the rare ones?.) They've found 120 new park records for moth species.

Need for oversight and lack of charisma are challenges (kids aren't as excited about bugs as they thought they might).

Dung beetle project -- too hard for the kids to id the beetles, experts had to do this piece. Also charisma "i thought kids would be just thrilled about combing thru poop and looking for beetles but that wasn't the case"; disconnect between collection and id

Hague Vaughan: Citizen Science as a Catalyst in Bridging the Gap between Science And Decision-makers

EMAN (ecological monitoring and assessment network) in canada

We're too self-referential...we're not affecting policy the way we should
"Citizen science provides answers; we need to start informing society's choices."

Why isn't the assement and monitoring effective? Why isn't anything changing?

Enhancing effectiveness:
- standardization
- engagement
- assessment
- delivery (cogeneration of knowledge in a decision maker - most cookbooks aren't bought by people who want to cook, bought by people who want to look at food)

Monitoring has been viewed as sicence instead of as managment

Problems:
- Timeliness - by the time yoiu know there's an emergency, it's too late
- Exponetial change: showed an amazing slide of several small graphs of various things, all ramping up exponentially, including # of fast food restaurants, etc.
- Uncertainty and Uncontrollability - resillence, adaptive management, complexity

Adaptive ecological managment model - need to assess and determine a response annually at minimum.

What really matters is the creation of social captial - talking to each other and forming relationships. Once social captial begins, it grows.

Canadian Community Monitoring Network

Timeliness is more important to decision makers than certainty...allow decision makers to weight the choices, trade-offs and consequences and MAKE THE DECISIONS, otherwise it becomes adversarial.

1: what are you seeking to change?
2: who can help and influence the change (put them on a board with you)
3. what info do they need
4. what are key opportunities to communicate
5. assessment

Arboreal lichens -- showed air quality changes over town (took three days, plus gis) GIS is a powerful link, people could see where they lived (I asked Hague to send me info on this; good project for MAKE)

Ecosystem goods and services are the key to decision makers...they don't care about biodiversity, but natural captial (clean air and water)...(This made me wonder about food...really our food production systems are not something separate from our ecosystems, but we think of them that way.)

Emerging principle: understanding and meeting the needs of the target decision maker is the foundation of ecosystem science effectiveness. Need delivery of tailored info to support choices and policies.

3 weeks ago - SAMPAA EMAN Workshop "Bridging the Gap between Science and Decision-Makers Workshop"; proceedings should be here eventually.

Steve Kelling, Director of Info Science, Cornell: When pigs can really fly, we'll build a tool to count them

eBird uses the same type of transactions as banks used

Working with NatureServe and NCEAS to collaborate:
- develop a core observations data model
- allow model to be extensible
- something else I didn't catch

Hoping to create an application framework that users can manipulate using a browser interface like Yahoo Pipes or Google Gadgets

Will be open source.

Probably over 30 million records in Avian Knowledge Network (they called it a knowledge network, not a data network, deliberately)

1200 environmental variables in the AKN

Interesting graphs of purple martin observations and numbers.

Used term "citizen Science sensor networks"

Sarah Kirn: Vital Signs’ open source data input tools

Vital Signs

Ireland project -- kids on both side of the water sharing their research results; serves education AND peacemaking

First probes they used said 'for education only, don't use for science', so they discarded them and got quality probes (Yay!).

Scientists like tech-enhanced data collection (eliminates transcription errors)

Teachers really wanted the data to mean something; this was really important to them.

Not everyone uses latitude and longitude (Irish National Grid Reference System is used there!)

All 7th-8th graders in Maine get a laptop computer; she's very enthusiastic about this and it sounded very progressive.

Josh Knauer: Information Commons/ innovating online data mining

MAYA Design "Information Liquidity"

Historical models

- public libraries are one of the best models for data distribution

- massively replicate books while maintaining intellectual property and metadata

- specialized function: interlibrary loan; often if it's not a rare book, the requesting library will actually order the book.

- book burning -- EPA will sometimes destroy records/data because of complaints about it, usually from companies. Replication could combat this. Also replication can combat other types of data loss due to equipment failures, etc.

Information commons

KML file format usages has exploded ...usgs, epa, etc. use it instead of ESRI format.

Software as well as data can be added to the commons.

Census data is in the commons and people are using it.

They did a "book burning" in the commons with data about florida panther tracking...don't want to provide that data publicly. With social issues, "the geeks often get it wrong."

Rick Bonney on "Why are we here?"

Believes that science education has become a stand-in for teaching critical thinking

The experience of collecting data and observing leads to learning

Web Designs for Interactive Learning was created out of the conference where they were talking about web 2.0 before it had a name

He wants central location people can go to that represents the best thinking of the community.

The Toolkit - the dream is to have this be the place people come when they want to know how to do it. A dicotomous key? Starts with a question? Wants people to get help with creating or improving a project, or deciding not to do a new project and partner with someone already doing something similar instead.

Panel discussion: : Impacts of citizen science

Reef managed to get legistlation change for amnesty days for aquarists to return fish to stores (instead of releasing them inappropriately). They did this after divers reported non-native species in the area and they were able to determine that these were releases from the pet trade and not from ship ballast.

Suzanne Gurton: Astronomy for Citizen Scientists and Citizen Science Educators

Stardust at home - interesting project, somewhat similar to virtual nestbox monitoring. They find that rankings are an effective motivator for some participants.

Institute for Learning Innovation is partnering with them to study the culture of amateur asronomy clubs; they're interested in sustainable cutures; "the power of one" (the super-volunteer) isn't sustainable.

Certification -- can be motivating (achieve higher levels for recognition) AND can provide a way to increase the quality of your data and test applicants to find which data is most reliable.

Cyber Tracker

I skipped out of the next breakout session to talk to Louis Liebenberg about Cyber Tracker Conservation.

The software on the palm and windows mobile (pocket pc) is open source

Has created an application where anyone can create an interface for the palm/pocket pc without being a developer (and the db stuff is hidden)

Really amazing work here. Giving the trackers PDA's has elevated their status and made tracking interesting to the younger generation, so they're coming back to it. Also the interface is quite interesting; trackers cannot read and the thinking behind the interface just skips over the existence of paper forms (most computurized forms suffer because they're attempts to replicate a paper form instead of working with the medium.)

Grand Finale: presentations of working groups

During the conference, we had been breaking into working groups and discussion questions to help work towards building a toolkit. (Notes I took during that time don't appear here, and most of them are going into the documents that are the product of the conference.)

Research group:

Revelation: did not really appreciate how important the fate, quality, security, documentation, and ownership of the data was to them until now

Recurring theme: believe that there is an extremely important role for the scientists to particpate in citizen science; charge to the scientist to make sure that results of activity was published in scientific journtals, to citizen scientists, and to the public in timely fashion

Controversy: they felt discomfort with term citizen scientists; they felt that "citizen" was too US-centric

Community Building group (mine)

Revelation: lots of programs and resources already exist; need social science expertise when thinking of citizen science

Recurring theme: Citizen science means different thungs to different audiences;
community - what is it? There are scaling issues in all that we do.

Toolkit needs:
- glossary
- project marketplace
- volunteer management tools

Controversy: Does citizen science need scientists? Do terms citizen science or "toolkit" need to be changed?

Cyber Infrastructure Group

Revelation: lots of resources already exist; everyone here wants to scale their program up (reach, funding, participation, whatever)

Needs: The would like to see creation of a Public Science Corps to provide implementation leadership to crystalize a community of practice to present a common face to both private and public funders, public at large, and government. Also manage provide use of tools as assets

Evaluation Group

Toolkit needs: flexible to meet needs of diverse groups; should be dynamic and growing; want to build on what exists

Revelation: people are coming from many perspectives, but there are things in common across all disciplines; need to find a common language. Effectiveness in science may not be intuitive to science.

Recurring themes: evaluation is always dependent on goals; there are no cookie-cutter tools and there won't be any single ready-made kit

Controversy: do we need to be defining "citizen science" for scholarship, funding, or would this simply be exclusive. What degree of standardization is needed)

Education Group

They submitted their findings as a powerpoint presentation all in haiku; I didn't get it all down.

Revelations: caring citizens, many programs

Recurring themes: working together, demystifying science, keep an end in mind

Controversy: Beyond NSF, who determines the model, all are citzens

Discussion after working group presentations

"It's Science 2.0"

NSF Conference proposals are capped at $250,000

The notion that some have voiced that "citizen" is an exclusive term is a very american idea, and we should not be concerned about this term as it means something much broader than "american citizenship". Much agreement from Canadians and other non-US attendees. (Much agreement and relief from me, too).

"We are a community now." - nice thought to be voiced near the end. There was a lot of excitement and energy in the room, even though we were pretty tired and had been going strong for several days!

Coming later this week: personal reflections on the conference.

Posted by terrie at June 24, 2007 10:00 PM

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