Science and citizenship: Capacity building for civic engagement through the MammalWeb citizen science project

Selected as Best Talk at the December 2017 British Ecological Society annual meeting.

Abstract of talk

Citizen science is increasingly utilised for ecological research. By crowdsourcing the capture and/or classification of scientific data, ecologists can increase the scope and resolution of the questions they tackle. Techniques for producing high quality citizen science data have led to advances in fields from plant-pollinator interactions to phenology. Here we present the potential for citizen science to stimulate civic engagement on ecological issues. Our project – MammalWeb (www.MammalWeb.org @MammalWeb) – involves citizen scientists in monitoring local mammals of northeast England with camera traps. Since 2015, we have amassed >150,000 volunteer-captured wildlife images which are collaboratively classified on our publicly accessible website. In addition to the collection and classification of data by citizen scientists, we attempted to guide them in becoming ecological “ambassadors”. With support from a British Ecological Society Outreach Grant, we partnered with Belmont Community School and worked with a group of mainly UK Year Nine students during 2016-2017. The students not only participated in MammalWeb for data capture and classification, but were also empowered to design outreach activities for their local community. This included a community fair and filming a short documentary to share the project with a wide audience. I will also describe how the students’ outreach and the MammalWeb citizen science project in general may stimulate civic engagement on ecological issues. Participants reported an increased awareness of their local wildlife which is unlikely to have been achieved with classroom learning. Additionally, MammalWeb citizen scientists provided data leading to the capture of a non-native species and substantially improved understanding of mammal fauna informing plans for a Local Nature Reserve (LNR). Some have initiated their own camera trap projects in County Durham, England and Galloway, Scotland. This demonstrates the potential of citizen science to engage the public on ecology-related policy-making, useful in a world of rapid ecological change.

Online photo album

https://www.flickr.com/photos/penyuan/collections/72157688996445011/

Video recordings of talk

Video recordings of this talk are deposited in the Wikimedia Commons here and on Vimeo.