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Citizen Science: A Powerful Tool for Sustainable Development

As I pulled up in my friend’s truck to the tunnel entrance to the Marin Headlands, part of San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, I entered what appeared to be a fine mist of white plant fluff. I turned off the motor and observed. Incidentally, the white plant fluff had wings, and was tumbling frantically in the early afternoon sun. ‘Less vegetable than animal,’ I thought, trying to figure out what I was witnessing.

The Marin Headlands, as viewed from Hawk Hill (Laura Booth)

When the answer clicked, I smiled to myself. This was the termite flight, a swarm cued by weather. It was to be expected, so I had been told, after the gentle rain that had fallen the previous night—the first “storm” to drop at least a quarter inch of rain (as the termites require) since I had arrived in the Bay Area in July.

I learned about the termite flight from the formidable Tim Behr, one of the volunteer citizen scientists at my internship with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a non-profit that monitors the migration of birds of prey as they pass through the Bay Area. The handing down of natural history represents just one of the ways that citizen science can facilitate sustainable development.

GGRO volunteers at work (Ruth Cantwell)

Citizen science is generally described as the participation of non-scientists in scientific projects. Like many of our other decades-long volunteers at the GGRO, Tim represents the GGRO’s model of citizen science: investing heavily in a group of committed volunteers. But citizen science initiatives are remarkably diverse, ranging in scope from ecological monitoring via bioblitzes (check out those held in Melbourne, London, New York, and San Francisco) to crowd-sourced, online data acquisition about the shape of galaxies.

As a technique for sustainable development, citizen science is a powerful tool that touches on each of the three pillars of sustainability.

Economically, citizen science promotes the expansion of research efforts that are drastically undervalued in our society.

The GGRO is a prime example: the cost of staffing our hawk watch and banding programs with professionals each migration season could easily exceed our non-profit budget. By keeping a smaller staff and training a labor base of 300 volunteers, the GGRO has been able to maintain a 30-year research effort on hawks that is unparalleled on the West Coast. This data is vital for the evidence-based management and conservation of North American raptors and, as such, is valuable for maintaining a cultural ecosystem service: citizens obtain satisfaction merely from knowing that birds of prey (particularly such charismatic species as the Bald Eagle, our national symbol, and the Peregrine Falcon, an emblem of ferocity and wildness) persist in their natural habitats. In this sense, citizen science circumvents the problem of our undervaluing of conservation biology by ensuring that essential research goes on—funding be damned.

Future citizen scientists: students from the Marin Horizon School visit Hawk Hill (Laura Booth)

Likewise, citizen science can be an economically efficient way to collect massive amounts of data over time. Take eBird, Cornell’s app for birders, which harnesses the information collected by countless amateur and professional bird watchers to investigate the distribution and abundance of bird species all over the world. eBird-ers submitted more than nine million bird observations in May 2015 alone. No team of biologists could collect data at that scale. Shorter-term citizen science projects can also have long-term economic implications. For example, bioblitzes—rapid efforts that use volunteers and professionals to catalogue as much of the biodiversity in a designated space, such as a park or neighborhood, as possible—have been employed all over the world to provide baseline estimates of biodiversity in locations where none previously existed. The data collected by citizen scientists in bioblitzes can be used as preliminary data to justify research proposals to funding agencies, can help inform location-based land management decisions at minimum cost to governmental and non-profit entities, and can alert communities to the imminent loss of species that provide financially valuable ecosystem services.

Publicity for the 2014 Melbourne BioBlitz (www.melbourne.vic.gov.au)

Of course, all of these citizen science initiatives support sustainability through the benefits they provide to the environment.

In the case of the GGRO, citizen scientists are collecting information on the health of ecological indicator species. By virtue of their high trophic position, birds of prey tend to be affected by environmental contaminants before the damage of those contaminants manifests in other species; in this sense, problems for raptor populations can act as an early warning for problems afflicting entire ecosystems. This was exactly the case in the 1960s, when the widespread use of the pesticide DDT caused eggshell thinning and population crashes in several species of raptors—a phenomenon famously elucidated by Rachel Carson in her book, Silent Spring. Today, our volunteers are assisting in the research of a different environmental contaminant: rodenticides, the active chemicals in rat poison, which bio-accumulate in predators and which may be impacting species at all levels of the food web.

Generally speaking, online applications—such as eBird and iNaturalist—and bioblitzes make use of citizen scientists for ecological and biodiversity monitoring. Both of these activities are essential for rapidly increasing our knowledge of ecosystem function and community ecology, as well as for assessing conservation threats.

In addition to biological applications, citizen science can provide data and labor support for land-use and planning. TreesCount2015!, a citizen-science based initiative to map every single street tree in New York City, is just one such example.

Citizen scientists measure trees as part of TreesCount2015 (@healthforyouths on Twitter)

You’re probably still wondering where, exactly, the termites factor into my citizen science story.

My personal fascination with citizen science stems from its ability to unite the environmental and social facets of the sustainable development challenge.

Through much of this post, I have used my current internship with the GGRO as a case study in the relationship between a citizen science-based initiative and sustainability. And when I encountered the termite flight on my drive home, the linkage of the social and environmental benefits of citizen science became clear in my mind.

As a very recent transplant to California, I know almost nothing about its natural history, let alone its entomological history. The only reason I could correctly identify the termite flight was because of my friendship with one of GGRO’s volunteers. Were the GGRO a strictly professional organization, employing only avian biologists, I may never have had that delightful nugget of natural history passed on to me.

GGRO volunteers in conversation on the Hill (Nelia White)

Although no formalized assessments of the social impact of the GGRO on the local community, or even within its community of volunteers, have been published, the impact of such work is qualitatively obvious. It builds a community that coheres around experience in and stewardship of the environment.

In each of the examples I’ve given, scientists—biological, social, and astrophysical, among others—have joined with laypersons to gather a little bit more information about the world we share. Such initiatives have the power to rally various kinds of previously disengaged communities around science and the natural world, and to spread the creativity and wonder of science both to groups that traditionally have not had access to science and to future generations.

And although citizen science is far from a panacea for the disillusionment of the public from environmental issues, I believe it has substantial power to reconnect individuals to their environment—and to engage them in fighting back against the many dangers humans pose to it.

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Laura Booth is pretending to be an adult while working as a research intern with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a non-profit dedicated to the conservation of birds of prey. She believes in Rumi, tomatoes straight off the vine, and the power of science writing to reinvigorate our connection with the environment. Find her @LauraSBooth

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