So you want to lead citizen scientists? An essay on flexibility, controlled chaos and self-care.

by Dr. Allyson Jackson

Assistant Professor at Purchase College, SUNY
Second Century Stewardship Fellow, Acadia National Park
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www.allysonkjackson.weebly.com <- me
www.acadiabugproject.com <- this project

Facebook @JacksonEcoLab
Twitter @JacksonEcoLab
Instagram @JacksonEcoLab

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​Hi all!
It was suggested to me that it would be helpful to share my overall feelings on hosting citizen scientists this summer and I realized I need to do it right away, before both the good and bad get washed away from my memory! So I’m sitting in my living room in New York, I’ve poured a glass of wine and am ready to debrief.

I will say right away that hosting the citizen science groups was one of the best parts of this field season. I’ve always included some component of outreach in my projects, but it usually occurs after the fact (i.e., give a talk to a bird club) or in some sort of semi-staged setting (i.e., show people my field site or my field gear). This was my first experience in really diving into citizen scientist participation, getting folks out in the field on a regular basis, collecting data that actually will be used in my research.

Biggest citizen science crew we had this summer! I'm in the back row in the yellow vest - can you tell I broke my ankle a few minutes before? Don't worry, I didn't know it was broken in this pic!

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For those who don’t know my project, my research interests are in mercury exposure in the riparian food web – basically how mercury moves from aquatic systems to terrestrial ones. As I was planning this project, I really wanted to be able to quantify changes in bug abundance and diversity throughout the songbird breeding season (June and July in Maine). Bug collection is time intensive, especially when you want to repeat your measurements weekly. Because the folks at Acadia National Park are so supportive of outreach and citizen science, I decided to design the project where we would do quantitative/researcher led data collection paired with citizen science data collection. The goal for this year was threefold:

1. Track changes in bugs over the course of the season (What bugs are there? How do they change?)
2. Determine if we could recruit and organize citizen scientists for this type of project (Who would they be? Would they enjoy it?)
3. Analyze whether the data that the citizen scientists collect was similar to that collected by researchers (with the hope that future years could lean on citizen scientists even more!).

Undergraduate Veronica shows our citizen scientists how to pick bugs out of the muck

Undergraduate Alex engages one of our youngest citizen scientists

Now that I’ve survived the field season, here are some general things that I learned:

• Really consider your audience. Who are your citizen scientists going to be? I really wanted this project to be enjoyed by children and adults – so I had to carefully consider how I designed my data collection. I honestly made decisions based on what would be fun for kids! I really wanted everyone to leave not only having learned something, but also just thinking that ecology is cool. Incorporating kids meant we didn’t spend too much time on datasheets or taxonomic keys, but instead allowed the citizen scientists to learn the field techniques of collecting aquatic and terrestrial bugs, then us researchers brought back to the lab for identification and analysis on our own. We made sure to have field guides available for those who were interested, but mostly let people get dirty collecting bugs and putting them in vials.
• Get creative with outreach. At first, my goal was to develop a website (ours was www.acadiabugproject.com) that would showcase our project and give people information on volunteering. If you are worried about making a website, don’t be! I used weebly and they make it pretty much idiot-proof to make a website that looks really professional. Once the website was live, we used the National Park Service volunteer page to post that we needed help, but we also got active on social media. Having twitter, facebook and Instagram feeds that showed photos of what we were doing allowed folks who were curious about the project to see what they were signing up for. I even tried paying $20 for a facebook promotion – where facebook pushes your event to people in the area that have certain interests (nature, outdoors, etc). Is it scary that facebook knows so much about us? Yes. Is it really cool that my little bug project got shown to 3,000 people for the cost of a lobster roll? YES!
• Make it real. I spent a lot of time worrying about how to make each citizen scientist have a great experience, but I had to stop worrying at some point and allow it to be real and authentic (and sometimes field work is hard!). If you make it overly prescribed, the experience feels more like a class or lecture and less like real research. We tried to help make people comfortable where we could (bringing coolers of lemonade on hot days seemed to help) but we also just told everyone that field biology happens in all types of weather – so they should be proud that they succeeded at hiking and catching bugs on hot days.
• Be flexible and adapt. Honestly, maybe this should have just been the only thing I wrote for this whole post. Be flexible. Things change minute to minute and week to week. Some groups wanted to spend the whole time looking at field guides to figure out what species we caught while others wanted us to quickly tell them what family it was and move on. Some groups were diligent and picked over every last leaf while others just wanted to chase dragonflies. I couldn’t quite predict how each session would go and I stopped trying. I kind of leaned into the chaos and realized that was the best part! It’s just a totally different world than when you are doing strictly research and that’s ok. These aren’t hardened field technicians and they should be allowed to kind of follow their passion (within the parameters that you set up).
• Don’t be too flexible. Because I wanted to make things fun, it was hard to also be the disciplinarian. I decided it was important to set clear boundaries on certain things. For my project, it meant “do not bother the frogs”. This was one of the only directives that I said to each group at the start and followed up on. Because we weren’t studying amphibians, I really wanted to minimize disturbance to them but they are so prevalent and interesting that almost every group wanted to grab them.
• Enjoy the unexpected delights. Having been a field biologist for 10 years, I learned I wasn’t always good at predicting what would be cool to non-scientists. One of the things that I found most amusing was how much everyone got a kick out of wearing waders! I had expected the citizen scientists might just want to stand on land and scoop nets around the margin of the water. But given the option of putting on waders and going in, they all went for it! We quickly placed an amazon order for more waders in kids sizes and watched families take a million photos of their kids as soon as they were decked out in waders.
• Extra hands are helpful. I planned this project envisioning that it would be just me leading each expedition… but boy am I happy that I ended up with an army of undergraduates to assist me. Not only did they get to stretch their science communication wings, but the citizen scientists got to spend a lot more time in one-on-one interactions with us researchers.
• Give yourself extra time. Everything takes longer than you would expect when you are wrangling citizen scientists. Meet ups get delayed and hikes go slow and there needs to be snack breaks. All these things are perfectly fine, but your researcher hat needs to account for these and know that it is ok.  
• Account for the citizen science day hangover. Besides being flexible, this is my other major takeaway from the summer. Starting the summer, I thought I would easily just add on citizen science days to our schedule and it would be no big deal. What I learned is that even though those hours weren’t as physically demanding as most field work, I ended the day feeling absolutely mentally exhausted. Organizing gear and answering questions and moving that many people through their experience takes a lot out of you and you need to account for that and maybe give yourself a lighter day after. As a researcher, I find it very hard to take it easy during the field season (“but we only have these two months to collect data!!!”) but I learned that I had to take it down a notch in order to accommodate adding citizen scientists into my project. In order for everyone to prosper and enjoy their experience, you need to make sure you haven’t overloaded your field schedule. I was acutely aware that I may be the first experience these kids are having with a career biologist, and a female one at that. Did I want them to leave thinking that girl looked exhausted, seemed to hate her job and needed to relax? Or did I want them to leave thinking that they saw someone who looked like them doing a cool job that she seemed to love? Obviously the latter. So you researchers considering adding citizen scientists into your program – make sure you also incorporate a little self-care as well. You are doing a great thing by pulling back the curtain a little on what we do as biologists, but it might mean you need to also need an extra hour to sleep in as a reward.

Hope this helps anyone considering a citizen science project in the future! I’m definitely still a citizen science newbie – but feel free to email me if you have any questions about this (allyson.jackson@purchase.edu).

Terrestrial sampling using aspirators

some sites were plenty "authentic", authentically muddy...