A Webcast of Bird Nesting as a State-of-the-Art Citizen Science

The societal impact of Open Science: a scoping review

Open Science (OS) aims, in part, to drive greater societal impact of academic research. Government, funder and institutional policies state that it should further democratize research and increase learning and awareness, evidence-based policy-making, the relevance of research to society's problems, and public trust in research. Yet, measuring the societal impact of OS has proven challenging and synthesized evidence of it is lacking. This study fills this gap by systematically scoping the existing evidence of societal impact driven by OS and its various aspects, including Citizen Science (CS), Open Access (OA), Open/FAIR Data (OFD), Open Code/Software and others. Using the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews and searches conducted in Web of Science, Scopus and relevant grey literature, we identified 196 studies that contain evidence of societal impact. The majority concern CS, with some focused on OA, and only a few addressing other aspects. Key areas of impact found are education and awareness, climate and environment, and social engagement. We found no literature documenting evidence of the societal impact of OFD and limited evidence of societal impact in terms of policy, health, and trust in academic research. Our findings demonstrate a critical need for additional evidence and suggest practical and policy implications.

Impact of animal programming on children's attitudes toward local wildlife

Attitudes toward wildlife can have direct implications on children's interest in conservation behaviors. Animal programs are an example of interactive, educational experiences that have the potential to change attitudes by providing individuals the opportunity to get close to animal ambassadors and participate in engaging conversations about them. We conducted an animal program assessment with summer camps at the Ohio Wildlife Center to quantify changes in children's affiliation with local wildlife and their willingness to live near local wildlife. Campers showed an overall increase in affiliation and willingness scores from before to after an animal program, although with a small effect size. Overall willingness scores were lower than affiliation scores, but there was a significantly larger increase in willingness following the program. We found a strong correlation between affiliation and willingness scores. Overall, the study found that these animal programs positively influenced children's attitudes toward local wildlife and increased their willingness to live near them, suggesting animal programming could be used to decrease human-wildlife conflict. Visually seeing animals in the programs improved attitude scores, even for those not seen in this study, which suggests that program animals can act as an ambassador for other species. This opens the potential for utilizing animal ambassadors as powerful tools in conservation education about threatened and endangered species.

The Rapid Rise of Next-Generation Natural History

Many ecologists have lamented the demise of natural history and have attributed this decline to a misguided view that natural history is outdated and unscientific. Although there is a perception that the focus in ecology and conservation have shifted away from descriptive natural history research and training toward hypothetico-deductive research, we argue that natural history has entered a new phase that we call “next-generation natural history.” This renaissance of natural history is characterized by technological and statistical advances that aid in collecting detailed observations systematically over broad spatial and temporal extents. The technological advances that have increased exponentially in the last decade include electronic sensors such as camera-traps and acoustic recorders, aircraft- and satellite-based remote sensing, animal-borne biologgers, genetics and genomics methods, and community science programs. Advances in statistics and computation have aided in analyzing a growing quantity of observations to reveal patterns in nature. These robust next-generation natural history datasets have transformed the anecdotal perception of natural history observations into systematically collected observations that collectively constitute the foundation for hypothetico-deductive research and can be leveraged and applied to conservation and management. These advances are encouraging scientists to conduct and embrace detailed descriptions of nature that remain a critically important component of the scientific endeavor. Finally, these next-generation natural history observations are engaging scientists and non-scientists alike with new documentations of the wonders of nature. Thus, we celebrate next-generation natural history for encouraging people to experience nature directly.

A Systematic Literature Review on the Participation Aspects of Environmental and Nature-Based Citizen Science Initiatives

It is commonly argued that, despite the tremendous resonance Citizen Science (CS) has shown in recent years, there is still lack of understanding of important aspects defining citizens’ participation and engagement in CS initiatives. While CS initiatives could provide a vehicle to foster forms of participation contributing to the democratization of science, there is still limited attention paid to the “Citizen” component of the Citizen Science term. For the purpose of this work, we systematically reviewed the available literature for empirical studies in respect to citizens’ participation in environmental and nature-based CS initiatives established during the last two decades, using the PRISMA methodology. The participatory facet of the retrieved 119 CS initiatives was analysed on the basis of: (a) exclusion and inclusion demographic factors, (b) CS models and practices, (c) facilitators and constraints of citizen’s participation, and (d) environmental citizenship. Our findings show that the majority of the CS initiatives did not place restrictions on gender participation; however, we have identified that mostly highly educated adults participated in the reviewed initiatives. In addition, most of the CS initiatives reported in the literature were situated in the EU and USA, were mostly limited to the local scale, and primarily followed the contributory model. Academic institutions were found to coordinate the majority of the CS initiatives examined. By using digital technologies, academic scientists were able to control and increase data quality, as well as to engage a broader audience, even though they were mostly treating volunteers as “data collectors”, desiring their long-term engagement. Therefore, it will be of CS benefit to be better aligned with the mentality and needs of citizens. In this direction CS initiatives should trigger citizens’ learning gains and interpersonal/social benefits and personal, environmental, and social motivations, but also to shift their goals towards contributing to science and citizens’ connection with nature. On the other hand, there is a need to overcome any design and implementation barriers, and to enhance democratization through a more participative engagement of active and aware citizens, thus promoting environmental citizenship.

Birds in the playground: Evaluating the effectiveness of an urban environmental education project in enhancing school children's awareness, knowledge and attitudes towards local wildlife

Children nowadays, particularly in urban areas, are more disconnected from nature than ever before, leading to a large-scale "extinction of experience" with the natural world. Yet there are many potential benefits from children interacting with nature first-hand, including via outdoor learning opportunities. Urban environmental education programmes typically aim to increase awareness and knowledge of local biodiversity and to promote positive attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, limited research has been conducted evaluating to what extent these interventions achieve their goals. Here, we explore and assess the influence of a six-week bird-feeding and monitoring project conducted within school grounds ("Bird Buddies") on individual awareness, knowledge and attitudes towards birds by primary school children. This initiative was conducted across eight (sub-)urban primary schools within Brighton and Hove (UK), with 220 participating children (aged 7 to 10). Via pre- and post-project questionnaires, we found evidence for enhanced awareness of local biodiversity, alongside significant gains in both bird identification knowledge and attitudes, which were greatest for children with little prior exposure to nature. Many children expressed a keenness to continue improving the environmental value of their school grounds and to apply elements of the project at home. Student project evaluation scores were consistently positive. Mirroring this, participating teachers endorsed the project as a positive learning experience for their students. One year after the project, several schools were continuing to feed and watch birds. Collectively, the findings from this study highlight the multiple benefits that can be derived from engagement with a relatively short outdoor environmental activity. We therefore believe that such interventions, if repeated locally/longer term, could enhance children's experience with nature in urban settings with combined positive environmental impact.

Social media and scientific research are complementary-YouTube and shrikes as a case study

Fascination with animals and their behaviour is one the most prominent patterns persisting in all human cultures. During the last decades, however, technological development and public access to the Internet have increased the speed and the extent of information sharing at an unprecedented rate, in some cases even challenging the traditional methods used in science. In order to understand the extent of this influence, we focused on the behaviour of shrikes. Shrikes are an enigmatic group of songbirds with a unique behaviour of impaling prey. We employed an extensive Internet search on YouTube (YT), a very popular and increasingly important source of information worldwide, for videos recording shrikes. Our analyses revealed that the number of shrike videos on YT is strongly positively correlated with classical knowledge on shrikes from books and scientific articles. Our results also suggest that in some cases YT may provide an alternative source of information on shrike ecology and behaviour. YT videos may thus provide new insights into the study of certain species or subjects and help identify gaps in ecological studies, especially in poorly studied species.