Who’s Tapped Out and What’s on Tap? Tapping Into Engagement Within a Place-Based Citizen Science Effort

Abstract

Participatory approaches to natural resource research, such as citizen science (CS), have become increasingly popular as they foster direct and indirect public input and engagement that can lead to the acquisition of place-specific scientific information needed to address local conservation research and management objectives. Understanding how differing degrees of participant engagement are experienced by those involved and the feasibility of experimental designs (i.e., with random assignment and control groups) to vary and measure such engagement are important and lacking. In this study, we report on an exploratory CS project measuring storm surge in three coastal estuaries, providing lessons learned about the design and sustainment of a quasi-experimental, place-based, co-created CS effort. Drawing from surveys, interviews, and field notes, we discuss methodological and ethical issues related to implementing an experimental design as well instances in which researcher-citizen scientist expectations regarding engagement were (mis)aligned and impacted participant experiences and project success.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Place-based, natural resource focused, citizen science projects require high engagement on behalf of project facilitators and may be particularly challenging for practitioners who have university appointments and/or are working in small teams with limited funding sources.

• Carrying out an experimental design within place-based citizen science initiatives raises practical concerns related to getting research off the ground as well as ethical concerns surrounding participants’ engagement preferences.

• Practitioners must prioritize making space for negotiations and ongoing conversations about expectations for engagement, on behalf of the project facilitators and citizen scientists, at various stages of the project.

Keywords:

• Citizen science
• mixed methods
• participatory research
• place-based research
• science communication
• storm surge

Acknowledgements

The authors offer thanks to the 28 citizen scientists who volunteered their time and effort to collect these data. This work would not have been possible without their efforts. The authors would also like to thank Kyah Lucky, Dylan Schlichting, and Elliot Huguenard for help with sensor deployment, training citizen scientists, and transportation from the university. We would also like to thank Billy Helprin and Cloe Chunn for help in recruiting participants, and Linda Silka and Jane Haskell for facilitating science cafe discussions with citizen scientists.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by National Science Foundation Award IIA-1644691 and in part by National Science Foundation Award IIA-1355457.