Michael Bear, Citizen Science Project director for Ocean Sanctuaries, recently wrote an article on the importance of Citizen Science in Ocean Conservation. The article inspired me o do a podcast episode on the same subject. Nathan and I did some research to find out what has worked in the past and where we should go in the future for more productive Citizen Science projects.
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Welcome to the Speaker for Blue podcast session 139. What's up everybody? Today we are going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects of all time, not just the ocean. We're going to talk about citizen science and how citizen science is maybe changing the way of the future for ocean conservation. Is it improving it? Is it not improving it? We're gonna find out we're gonna go in depth today into citizen science for the ocean conservation world or industry on today's episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast. Stay tuned. Welcome to the Speaker for Blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host, he still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder speaker for Blue dot com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. Today is Wednesday. We've decided again to switch things up. Monday was a holiday for me. It was Easter Monday. I had the kids. I couldn't put out a podcast on the Sunday because it was Easter and just all weekend was just riddled with family stuff. A lot of fun. I had a great time. However, it was a difficult for me to put together a podcast that would have been of value for you. So I decided, you know what, let's take Monday off and let's put Wednesday on the books. And so today we're going to be talking about citizen science. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going a little more in depth on citizen science and what we, you know, what we consider, what is citizen science? What what are the benefits? Are there advantages, disadvantages? How does it work? If you want to become a citizen science, can you be one? Do you want to be on all that kind of stuff? You know, how it helps ocean conservation? We're going to go through that. We're going to look at some studies that kind of cover the benefits of citizen science and expose maybe some weaknesses that citizen science have has. You got to remember that citizen science, and we're saying that a lot, I hope it won't mess it up. But citizen science is fairly new. It's a fairly new concept. It's fairly new in practice. And researchers and educators play an important role. And actually, that part really, both of those people really kind of need to come together to make sure citizen science works, citizen science works, I knew I was going to mess it up. Anyway, so we're going to get in all that today. Because I was kind of, I was, I was inspired last week. Michael Bear, who has been on the podcast before is a great, great guy. He is a Oh, I forgot his title isn't this embarrassing. Michael Bear, the way I know Michael Bear is through on Facebook, we met on Facebook, he is he was he was he was on the podcast because I brought him on because he was in charge of a citizen science project for green sharks. And I had him on during our shark week special, which was really kind of cool. And I'm going to say he is the citizen science project director for ocean sanctuaries. I had a feeling was ocean sanctuaries, but I wasn't sure that I want to make sure of the name. So, you know, who knows more about citizen science than Michael Bear, because he is the citizen science project director for ocean sanctuaries. Now they do a lot of different things. They have whale shark diaries. So he's the research he works. He's the citizen science advisor at whale shark diaries. He's also the citizen science project director at ocean sanctuaries. He's a contributor to California Diber magazine. He studied sharks at that current member of the American Elizabeth rank society, studied American Academy of Underwater Sciences, science scientific diving. Liz in San Diego. And when he came on the show, we talked a lot about his program, why he started, he's not a scientist. He doesn't have an education in science, although he knows quite a bit about science now through his work. But he he started the citizen science project for green sharks, or sorry, six kills sharks, not green sharks, six kills sharks, I always say green sharks because they're green, six kills sharks, because he wanted he noticed him and some other divers in the San Diego area noticed, I believe around La Jolla that there are a lot of six kill sharks around and they're more and more. So they started documenting these on like an Excel spreadsheet and so forth. And they started to come up with protocols and how to document. And it's gotten to the point now where they actually identifying individual with the technology that they have with like GoPro and underwater cameras and stuff, more and more people are participating. And they can actually identify individual, individual sharks by their patterns on their, I guess, quote unquote cheeks on the side of their mouths or the side of their body. They have unique markings, and they can actually identify that's they actually identify, you know, individuals coming back to the area or they're staying in the area or they're found a lot in the area. It's really kind of interesting. The work they're doing and hopefully speaker for blue will help them out and analyzing that kind of date in the future. But that's another another podcast and other time, a little hint of what's coming anyway for speaker for blue. Anyway, so Michael Barrett wrote a a an article on citizen science recently. And it was kind of a cool article. He sent it to me, he was all proud. I'm just trying to pull it up there now and make sure that I have it here. Here it is here. And it was posted. So its perspectives in marine citizen science was the title. And it was posted in the Journal of Microbiology and biology education volume 17 issue one, which is great. It just came out in March 2016. And essentially what he did is he talked about citizen science, he defined it. He talked about, you know, how Cornell lab of ornithology is where citizen science really hit the world and is one of the largest citizen science projects in the world. They have people from all over the world that help with their their data collection and so forth says more than 200,000 people contribute to the Cornell lab citizen science projects each year, gathering data from a vast scale once unimaginable. Scientists use the data to determine how birds are affected by habitat loss, pollution, and disease. They trace bird migration and document long term changes in bird numbers continent wide. The results have been used to create management guidelines for birds, investigate the effects of acid rain and climate change, and advocate for the protection of declining species. That's a pretty big. Those are pretty big results from people who aren't trained in science. There used to be sort of, and I guess maybe now there's still is a stigma that only scientists could really come up with science and only science can collect data. And yes, to a certain point, scientists know how to collect data and make sure that it stays intact and make sure that it's right for the analysis to be done correctly. But the actual physical collection of the data, if you know the protocols, if you know the methods, scientific methods, if they're written out for you and you're trained on those methods, to actually collect that information, you can do a lot of good, you can do a lot of collection. And with the way science is now, I'm going to tell you the way science is now actually, because a lot of people don't really know. We scientists, there's a big secret, scientists are not paid a lot of money, not marine biologists anyway, not marine ecologists like I am, we're not paid a lot of money. The benefit we get from science is not the money we can survive a lot of us can survive, which is great. Some of us, it's still difficult because we choose our passion over our money. We love what we do. A lot of the times it just engulfs us in what we do. There's a reason why I'm doing speak up for blue. There's a reason why I do a podcast three nights a week or three days a week. I record these at night when my kids go to bed. Right now it's 10 30 at night. I have to get up at like six or seven. I don't get any sleep. It's my passion to do it. I work another job. At the same time I do this. It's all I think about a lot of the times. I think about the ocean. I think about science. I think about marine science and ocean science and conservation. I think about it probably 40 to 50% of the day. The rest is my family and stuff like that. That's what I think about. It engulfs me. A lot of people in science are the same way. We don't get paid the big bucks. Our benefits are that we get to go out into nature and we get to see some phenomenal things. We get to be inspired and we get to be mesmerized and we get to be humbled and we get to just be awestruck in the places that we've been and the things that we've been able to do. That is says something that you cannot pay any kind of money for. With that said there's not much money in science in general. To do science projects scientists are very crafty with how they use money. We use money very carefully. Especially because we have low budgets for our scientific studies. We have to be careful. We can't hire a lot of people. We can't go a lot of places. If my study area, if I live in Ontario and my study area is in Costa Rica, I got to fly there. I can't fly a ton of people there to go and do sea turtle research if I want to do. I can't. I just can't afford it. I don't get the funding to do that. This is if I were chief scientists. That happens all around the world. People don't always get a lot of money to do this. We fight for our money. We have to battle for it. We have to write endless grants and then we get the money and then we do our best with the money that we get. A lot of times we put in for a lot of money. We're going to do a project that gave us half and we have to deal with half. It's not an easy way. If that's even if you get funded, there's some scientists who just keep going without being funded and they keep doing the research because they believe in it. They have a passion for it and they think it's going to contribute to science or conservation or it's going to have some overall effect on the benefit of science. That's how scientists think. You have limited budgets, limited resources in terms of people and instruments. Now what? Now what do you do? You get people to come out who are interested because on the other side of this, scientists need people to go out and sample to collect field data. On the other side, you have the people who you want to go and collect this data. You can't hire people and you can't pay them because you don't have the money. If you have the money, you'd probably pay people who are educated in this kind of thing. You get people who are maybe somewhat interested. Marine biology, it's a little easier to get people interested because everybody or somebody wanted to be a marine biologist at some point in their lives. To be honest, some people come to me afterwards and say, "Hey, like halfway through the career and say, "Hey, I want to come back into marine biology. I took a couple courses in university. I knew I wasn't going to get paid a lot of money, but now my job isn't really fulfilling and I want to get into something more fulfilling and I want to go back into marine biology." So we did. They do and they come back and they struggle a little bit but they come back and they enjoy their work. Then you have the people who graduate into that kind of stuff and then they go to school and they work like myself and we try to find jobs and try and work in the area that we want and sometimes we're veered off and on tangents in different directions and we end up where we end up. But it's not easy. So what you need is when you have money, you have a little bit of money, you have a project that you need to do but you need to collect a lot of information. You don't have the people. So you want to convince people, "Hey, you wanted to become a marine biologist one time. How would you like to go out on a boat and take pictures of dolphins or take pictures of whales during a whale survey so that we can identify these whales afterwards? We'll teach you how to identify them. We'll teach you how to take pictures properly and zoom into the right aspects and stuff. And then maybe if you want, we'll teach you how to identify individuals through computer programs. All that stuff is teachable, right? If the person is willing to do it and what happens is you get this army of people, this army of citizen scientists who one are interested in in oceans are interested in science and they want to learn and they want to have benefits to the point where people will actually pay to go on vacation to do citizen science because they think it's fun and it is but that's what they that's their feelings. You know some people will go to all inclusive resorts and drink their butts off and eat a ton and come back and have a great time and that's fine but there are some people out there who will travel the world to participate in different citizen science projects. One week on vacation they'll be going to Costa Rica to do sea turtle research. The next week they might be going to South Africa to intern for a month you know at at oceans research down in South Africa looking at and studying great white sharks. There's a lot of different things that they can be doing and if you have the budget and you want to travel or even if you don't want to travel you want to be part of these birders where you know Cornell you know has the citizen science project for birders. You know who know a lot about birds and all they have to do is just know about the methodologies of how to collect the information. So now you have this army of people you call citizen scientists and then what they're doing is they're reporting back the information they collect to the project and all of a sudden these projects can put out a series of results like the results that have been used to create management guidelines for birds investigate the effects of acid rain and climate change on birds and advocate for the protection of declining bird species. Cornell was it would not be able to the people of Cornell would not be able to do this if it wasn't for citizen science. So now you know there's a goal that these citizen science they'll probably return and do the same kind of surveys over and over again in their area so that they know it goes towards a benefit to these birds and a protection they know there's a goal right and they know the results what they what these scientists have been able to do with their data. So there's a bit of an ownership there's a bit of a scientific literacy which is huge in citizen science it teaches people science and if you look if for god forbid you look at Donald Trump and his followers and the republicans and their followers and their lack of acknowledgement of science you realize that a lot of people have no understanding or don't have a width of understanding of or an inch of understanding of science little in citizen science little in ocean science and it is staggering the amount of people who just believe in anything that people will tell them and not understand facts and not understand science. So citizen science can bring that literacy to people who are interested in just being outdoors and being on the ocean and volunteering their time to help a charity or an organization or a government program right or a university program like Cornell. So Michael Barrett wrote about Cornell as one of his examples and he talks about how respectable it is and how you know that the scientists are trained and mentored the citizen science are trained and mentored by scientists they have a whole program set out to it and it's a really great program. Now there's other citizen science programs those are birds now there's two that that Michael talks about it's called marine citizen science groups and he says he gives an overview of the two citizen science groups and the one is reef and the other one is reef check both very similar in what they do but i'll read you the different missions that they have. So reef according to their website the reef's mission is to conserve marine ecosystems for their recreational commercial and intrinsic value by educating and listing and enabling divers and other marine enthusiasts to become active stewards and citizen scientists. Reef links the diving community with scientists resource managers and conservationists through marine life data collection and related activities so it's a program to train citizen scientists to monitor coral reefs around the world i believe it's around the world and they use a specific technique they use the roving diver diver technique whereby after taking classes in local marine life identification divers are turned loose to dive wherever they please and to identify local marine life and especially prepared waterproof marine life data sheets prepared by reef so reef provides the materials to actually do it they provide the training the local identity marine life identification and the goal is to find as many species as possible so divers are encouraged to look under ledges and up the water column look all look in the nooks and crannies of the reef they want to find as many species and identify as many species as possible. At the conclusion of each survey each recorded species is assigned one of four categories based on how many fish we're seeing throughout the dive cycle so you get a score of a single one if you only see a single fish see two fish two or two to ten fish you see a few you see many if it's between 11 and 100 and then you consider it abundant if it's greater than 100 okay so there's a link in the in this paper to the the reef roving diver technique and it teaches you how the fish survey is done okay then this now it has an advantage of not requiring the diver to do exact fish counts which is kind of nice because then the diver does not have to be precise you know it's very difficult when you're diving to count the amount of fish or estimate the amount of fish so you try and find a good range so 11 say between 11 and 100 which is many if you see that many fish you're good you know I mean you know it's you know it's many if it's over a hundred you're probably going to see a lot of fish in your face and that's going to be abundant and that's going to be kind of cool too you're going to you're going to be able to see that so the categories are made so it's easy for the diver to decipher what the range in numbers are right obviously if you see one and it's a single if you see two then it's a few and you can you can see that right so it has it has that but it's dependent on diving having accurate knowledge of the local species so making misidentification possible with beginner and non-local divers so the training has to be on point and the diver has to be good at the training or it has to be good identifying species because that's what your data is all about now reef species some of them can look alike and so it's very difficult to determine you know fish from one fish from another so you want to make sure that you know the the person who is being trained really knows their stuff and you're really relying on the fact that they trained well um you know so that there's a several levels of certification and experienced local divers who have taken the complete series of reef fish ID fishinars experts levels one to five can become extremely proficient in identifying species in a high level accuracy today the data has been used in scientific papers and there's a bunch of on the reef.org site there's a bunch of publications that they can be cited in now reef check is a bit of a different thing the training is a little bit more rigorous um it was found in 1996 by marine ecologist Gregor Hodgkin which i've actually hudgson which i've actually been in contact with again this is stuff that we're going to find out in a few weeks um and he came up with the reef check for a foundation it's an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation of two ecosystems tropical coral reefs and california rocky reefs so they have a headquarters in los angeles and volunteer teams in more than 90 countries and territories okay so reef check this so this is the mission of reef check reef check works to create partnerships among community volunteers government agencies businesses universities and other non-profits reef check goals are to educate the public about the value of reef ecosystems and the current crisis affecting marine life to create a global network of volunteer teams trained in reef check scientific methods who regularly monitor and report on reef health to facilitate collaboration that produces ecologically sound and economically sustainable solutions and to stimulate local community action to protect remaining pristine reefs and rehabilitate damaged reefs worldwide so unlike reef rechex training is not free and their volunteer divers are required to be re-certified each year in order to be able to participate they also use a different technique they use a reef check california technique uh where divers are trained in the use of fixed transex lines instead of a roving like trying to move all over the place to find as many fish as you can this is in transex lines to assess the relative abundance and size distribution of target species and changes in these parameters over time so the transex lines are laid down at the bottom over predetermined distance in the low and the fixed location that that permit that permits that permit long-term monitoring of certain target species over time through repeated visits and the surveys at the survey site so it's kind of interesting you see the difference between both i'm not going to go into more detail if you want we'll put this link in the in the resource section of the show notes that we're going to kind of change up in the few weeks but it's kind of interesting to see how this actually works you see two different citizen science projects that have basically very similar goals they want to make sure that reefs are monitored they want to make sure the scientists can get ahold of reefs and they use volunteer divers to do it divers dive all over the world especially the ones who love diving they will go all over the world they'll go to the south pacific they'll go to the Caribbean they'll go to the east coast the west coast uh pacific and the Atlantic oceans they'll go in the Arctic you know they go in the Antarctic like they just go everywhere because they want to see everything in the ocean they want to see different things almost like birders where they want to see they write down a list of all the different animals they see divers in the same way they want to see different habitats different fish different invertebrates they want to see everything now what you're doing is you're taking that passion you're taking that you know lust for adventure and different and different aspects of the ocean and you're having them document and they take pride in that documentation and then they send it back to reef or reef check and all of a sudden you have this you have this big huge database of hundreds and thousands of divers that are grabbing all this stuff i mean it's just it's just amazing so it's kind of interesting uh what you know how this comes to be um now you have to remember though there any sorry at the end of the at the end of the the article he talks about two different projects that ocean sanctuary is the what he's director of in the citizen science project their stuff they have they have sharks at california partnership with national geographic field scope uh citizen citizen science data collection tool where they um you know they begin they use national geographic latest citizen science data collection tool known as field scope um and then it describes an interactive mapping platform that extends the tools of exploration and investigation of everyday science enthusiasts i'm not going to read it all because you can read it but essentially what it does is it would tries to identify where all the different species are um around the world basically and i think it's kind of cool that it it's headquartered there so you can see a lot of cool things uh they also have the identification of it's not six gill it's seven gill sharks my apologies i said six gill before i said green sharks before it's seven gill sharks i'm sorry michael it's late at night for me today um but yeah so they they have um you know he uh they've partnered ocean change stories partnered with jason homeberg of developer of wild book a web based application for wildlife data management wild book has been successfully used to identify individual whale sharks around the world so he's not only doing seven gill sharks but doing individual whale sharks uh or sorry this is what what this jason homeberg is doing ocean sanctuary is now using that to identify seven gill sharks in the areas in the san diego area thus far 42 seven gill sharks have been identified using wild book algorithms um which is kind of an interesting aspect so now they're using this they're not only just identifying how many sightings of seven gill sharks are in the san diego area but they're also saying hey do they have individual sharks you know what do we you know how do we do this so he he gives it michael gives a description of these and i know if it's taken a long time to describe some of these and i won't go into too much more detail about each citizen science program but you know there's it's an interesting fact that the big thing about citizen science i kind of mentioned it earlier is the the benefits is you get more data and you're able to collect data that you want for your study as a scientist plus you encourage scientific literacy within non-scientific people so citizens right uh i'm not going to just say regular people because they're not regular people they are just non-scientists and they want to become scientists they want to do scientific things and i think that's fantastic so but the idea is you have to make sure that the people who are involved and who are working the citizen science program are giving the proper advice and the proper protocols for these citizen science to go out and do not only that but you have to what people have found i had nathan uh johnson who's who's our our blog writer and um a lot of other things that speak up for blue he's he's become very handy here at speak up for blue um but he's done a lot to really uh research a lot of a lot of different things and about citizen science and i had him do some so yeah nathan prepared a document for me just with a bunch of facts about citizen science and he's been amazing at doing this kind of stuff for me so thank you nathan for that um but essentially what the big thing with citizen science is that we always want to say is citizen science worth it because they're saying okay the data like the whole point of citizen science is to come out to help you is for them to collect data and them to increase scientific literacy so are both you know a successful citizen science program is is the quality of data they're collecting good enough or or perfect enough to put it in scientific paper and to prove things on top of that are they really gaining scientific literacy are they learning are they engaged are they motivated because they know that they're actually having an effect you know they're not just collecting data to be busy bodies they want to actually learn they want to see the results actually do something in citizen science right and um and that those are the two biggest things so there've been some you know like i said before citizen science is fairly new especially in its practice and there are there have been some great projects with citizen science and there have been some not so great projects with citizen science where the data wasn't worth as well or as accurate as they thought it would be um and then of course there's also you know some projects that they've been really engaged and then you see real results like the Cornell lab of ornithology and then there've been other projects where they haven't been so engaged and maybe they don't see the the big the big thing about it or the big result and seeing the result actually do something for good so they get disengaged by that and they don't come back and you know you're always having to retrain citizen science scientists so there's two things here we're gonna tackle one in you know individually so there's a couple studies that we'll put in the in the resources about the data quality now in some instances the data quality were pretty accurate um you know in that instance was uh where is it here i'm just looking for it that's not it this isn't here it is um when it looked at marine invasive species so there was a project over on the east coast northeast coast between New Jersey and Maine and what what they had citizen scientists do is look at a 725 kilometer coastal transact then there are 52 sites and what they had scientists do actually these were third and seventh graders okay and they what they do they go to the coast and they would identify species of crab and they would identify the specific invasive crab carcinin carcinous manis and hemigrepsis saying euenusis and they would decipher them from native crabs okay within the intertidal zone of seven coastal states of the u.s. from New Jersey to Maine okay so the identification of crabs and the determinative determination of gender of the observed crabs was documented at least 52 sites so across the 725 kilometer coastal transects i'm just reading the abstract here now what they wanted to determine was how valid were how accurate were those um those those results now they noticed that it you know they had a 95% accuracy so students in grade three and seven had the ability to differentiate between species of crab with over 80% and 95% accuracy respectively so great threes were able to identify the species 80% of the time properly accurately and the grade sevens were actually able to identify 90% of the time okay with the 9% accuracy now the gender was a little bit more challenging okay so the accuracy exceeded 80% for the seventh grade students while 95% accuracy was found in students with at least two years of university education so there's a little bit different so it went up with education level which is you know sounds normal um but that you know the grade sevens had a little bit more trouble i'm sure they didn't even ask the grade threes to do that kind of stuff so you've got to look at who's collecting the data what they can do that's the whole point of this abstract why i want to bring it you want to make sure that they can actually identify now identifying species especially if they're easy to identify then you can really get any way to do it's not very difficult to train them looking at something like sexing an animal could be very difficult in some species and fish even more so okay so you have to you know you have to gauge what you're looking at uh now identifying species is good identifying say seven-gill shark is pretty is pretty good because they're pretty easy to identify i'm saying this without that much experience but you know they have seven gills if you notice there's seven gills on a shark it's most likely a seven-gill shark and there's other other um identification patterns but it's it could be taught okay one thing that's very difficult to be taught is another article that uh for citizen science was looking at water quality now water quality can be difficult in some cases okay because you know you're looking at you have to you know you're looking at measuring temperature you're looking at measuring salinity dissolved oxygen you're looking at um conductivity if you're in fresh water these are all parameters that are relative that are regularly measured in water bodies whether fresh water or ocean water the instrumentation plays a role in the maintenance of that instrumentation it takes a lot it takes some training to figure that out and to be trained on it it takes some training to be trained on of course it does it takes them a lot of training to understand it very well so there's that aspect of it now one uh uh dissertation a doctoral dissertation by um michael chadwick smith uh who did a whole phd on you know investigating citizen scientists it's a you know a tool that connects public and the scientific community to the scientific community through research-based projects and education campaigns and what he noticed was that he actually did like an accuracy assessment based on uh water quality between people who were taught or people who had no experience doing water quality who were and who were taught by educators to do to collect water to to collect water quality parameters compared to government projects that had scientists trained scientists correct water quality and they were different in a lot of cases okay they were significantly different statistically different what that meaning that they weren't similar okay so they're you know you have to it depends on when you're training it depends on the person that you're training whether you can handle you know doing something this a little more complex um you know dissolved oxygen salinity are even more complex because they require a lot of calibration of the instruments before you even you know put them in the water depending on the instrument they're using if it's an older one it's the harder to use newer ones tend to be easier to use um you know the lack of training if you're not trained by a scientist and you're trained more by an educator who may not have as much experience as the scientist that may not be a good thing that could affect the accuracy of the results or the data collected okay so it was kind of interesting to look at you know a lot of these the reason why i mentioned the educators part and i mentioned this earlier is because a lot of citizen science projects are managed and coordinated by marine educators who may not have this scientific background they may have a little bit of a science background or experience to run a field program and so when they're teaching protocols compared to scientists who have been in the field who have done these protocols on a on a very accurate basis then you know having those two teach they're going to teach very differently to the point where it could be an accurate and that's what happened in this this in the results of this dissertation so looking at the complexity of the data that needs to be found can be very difficult it can make can make sure there's some big inaccuracies now you know there's there's you basically have systems project systems science projects that can be effective in in basic projects like monitoring invasive species identification or small or similar project involved basically performing one skill so identifying wildlife is something that you can easily be trained to do sort of projects a little more difficult to explain like water quality testing using a variety of tools that can differ depending on geographic area may not be feasible to expect uh volunteers with very little training to collect very reliable data okay um excuse me citizen science doesn't necessarily seem to show an indication of getting people involved in science who otherwise wouldn't be since many citizen scientists already have an interest in the field so with that point we're looking at okay how do we engage more people the one of the ideas of citizen scientists to get people off their butts and get people in the field because we see things as scientists every day when we're in the field we see good things we see bad things if you talk to scientists who started marine science back in the 60s and 70s and say they're coral reef scientists and you talk to them now they'll tell you the changes they'll tell you how many reefs have gone that they used to dive on they used to be plentiful they'll tell you all that's actually quite depressing when you talk to some of them because they get disappointed that we don't see this generation doesn't see what they saw back then right they get disappointed because they've lost that um so what we want to do is we want to get people out we want to get people out in the field we want to get people seeing these changes first hand and explain to them why these changes are happening you get to bond a lot with people when you're in the field because sometimes you're in very remote areas sometimes very difficult to uh you know get anywhere so you're you're kind of huddled up together and you're just talking all day on a small boat or something and you really get to know someone you kind of get to bond with people so you build that trust you see the change you can explain the change that you've seen um and then you can you know they have a better understanding of the science behind it but what happens is citizen science doesn't necessarily bring people off their couch or onto into the ocean it's bringing people who already are interested which is fine but don't expect it to bring people out if you're i'm kind of doing this podcast in case people are thinking about doing citizen science projects or running a citizen science project i encourage you to do it just take heed of these results and just make sure that you don't do this right you don't make the same mistakes that other people have done that's really why i'm doing this kind of this podcast i want to inform you on how it's done right so the thing is is um you know i talk about engagement and learning and one of the best ways to engage volunteers is to show them exactly what the data is used for you know what it tells us how the data is going to be collected how it's going to be incorporated to research policy changes um and it because if the volunteers don't feel connected to the big picture like i mentioned before they don't see the role that they can play they're much more likely to become disengaged and what you want you don't want okay so i'm going to explain something here imagine we're running i'm running a project with a team i say i have a team of students and we have a student i have a student program that i work off of so i hire students every year to do field collection now i'm more apt to hot rehire a student from the year before or the year before who have a year or two experience in the same project because they know the idea they know the idea of the project they know where the data is going they know how to do the methodology you you probably work well with them um they work well with others and so you're going to rehire them it's a benefit to us because they know their stuff and if you have to do like fish identification or plant identification or reef identification or any kind of species identification and they already know it boom all you have to do is just kind of make sure that they've touched up after a year being at school you know and they know they know their identification so there's less training involved in repeat customers so if you want a citizen science project to do really well you want those repeat customers you want those citizen scientists to come out every year or every time you come monitoring because they take pride in it and they're engaged in it and they go tell their family and friends about it right i mean how cool is it to be like hey i just identified a sea turtle today i just saw three of them you know that's pretty that's pretty cool right that's a pretty cool projects to talk about even if you're not a marine biologist and people like what are you doing looking for sea turtles and you tell them what you're doing and then they get involved and they say well how do i do that and then they come out and they do the same thing right and it just grows and grows and grows and then more data can be collected so that's a good way to engage people is to really show them the big picture show them what the data they're collecting how it's helping their project so with all that said you know there's a lot of examples that are pro citizen science or and they're not saying against but there are a lot of cautionary tales about citizen science but you have to remember it is early on in the practicality of implementing citizen science into research programs and people are still learning it's an experiment now whether it's uh 20 to 30 year fat or experiment i don't know you know that's going to come with time but now there's organizations that are dedicated to making citizen science better engaging people teaching them how to learn teaching them how to get um build their scientific literacy that is what it's designed to do so these organizations are helping citizen science projects and to be honest to in my opinion i think they're the wave of the future with science being harder and harder to collect data with money being more stringent and less available to people like myself and others um citizen science is going to be the backbone of collecting field data there's an entire nonprofit organization i think it's called adventures in science who are dedicated what they do is they get people who want to explore the world people who hike the Appalachian trail people who go on major hikes and walks and camp and stuff and what they do is they actually say hey i've got somebody who's doing montre pichu do you need anybody to collect data samples from there and you and the person connects with the the the organization connects with different scientists that they build relationships with and say hey i know you're you're a plant guy or your plant girl um you want people to collect plant information well i've got people in this area you need samples right and they teach them how to do the samples and they take the samples and they bring them back this is that's a form of citizen science right these are citizen science these are explorers who are already out in nature and they want to benefit their being out nature by collecting scientific data they don't have to do it they volunteer to do it so if they volunteer to do it you know they have an incentive to do it there is a big um Appalachian trail uh study that monitors mammals it's gonna say marine mammals because i'm so used to saying it but mammals land mammals and you have people who are hiking the Appalachian trail and going into the hikes because they are changing out cameras that are automatically set on motion detectors so they take pictures of of of mammals i was gonna say marine mammals again of mammals uh like deer you know maybe some smaller mammals some coyotes or wolves or whatever i don't even know what's in the Appalachian trail um but they take pictures of that of those animals and they document those animals and then it goes into a research project that would otherwise be non-existent if it wasn't for these citizen scientists always wanting to hike this trail there's a there's a hiking trail group Appalachian hiking trail group that does this that participates in this now if you think about last weeks um last Wednesday's interview with Roy Mulder right which was speak up for blue dot com session 135 no 137 my apologies 137 uh session 137 we'll put the we'll put the link in the show notes but that is another citizen science program where you had a diver underwater diving club who decided to protect you know 20 to 30 different areas because it was important for recreational divers and not only did they protect it but now they inventory they inventory the rockfish they inventory the wolf fields they inventory the glass sponges and they help the government protect them because they're citizen scientists this is what they do you do not have to be a sit you do not have to be a scientist to participate in this kind of thing you just have to be interested in science and want to see some good things done and that's what this that's what citizen science does so i'm going to leave you with that and i would love to hear from you i want this to make this really um more interactive and i want to hear from you and say and i want to hear you say whether you're interested in citizen science projects or not or you've participated in some go to the comment section in the show notes that speak up for blue dot com forward slash session 139 and i want to hear from you i want to hear if you would be interested in doing some kind of marine citizen science a project or even a terrestrial one right a fresh water on whatever you want would you be interested in doing citizen science projects what would you be worried about you know what are your concerns and what would you be excited about i'd love to hear that from you okay so that's it for today i i hope you enjoyed it i know it's a bit of a long one where it's just me talking but i want to kind of i like doing these in-depth podcasts it's better i find to do these in-depth podcasts and do like four or five short ones and i think it's i hope i hope you enjoy it i hope you enjoy this because it's one of the first ones we're doing let me know if you enjoyed it you can hit me up ad speak up for blue on twitter and just let me know if you like these kind types of of podcasts i like doing them i know Nathan likes researching some of the materials with me so it's kind of fun to do that and thank you michael bear for inspiring this podcast because without your article i wouldn't have thought about it i mean i knew i would have done a citizen science podcast at some point but never this in-depth and i appreciate you writing that article to really get the message out there for marine citizen science projects and get them out there to look at that kind of stuff now there is uh i'll put a link out to a directory of different citizen science projects not just marine but terrestrial and you can look them up so if you are interested in them kind of gives a breakdown of every project and i think it's uh it's kind of a cool resource i i don't have it now but there is one available i don't i don't know the name of it but we'll put it up i forgot the name of it but we'll put it up on uh the show notes speak up for blue dot com forward slash session 139 okay so that's it for the podcast today thank you very much for listening you've been listening to the speak up for blue podcast talking about citizen science i am your host angelouin not only am i a marine ecologist but i'm also a wannabe citizen scientist and you'll be seeing more citizen science coming from speak up for blue in uh the next year or so we've got some programs coming for you guys and i think it'll be pretty pretty cool um but yeah my name's angelouin i'm the host of the speak up the blue podcast thank you very much for listening happy wednesday and we'll see you friday for ocean talk friday with nathan johnson and happy conservation see you later bye
