Engaging non-scientists in urban ecology: Lessons learned from designing, implementing, and sustaining three place-based citizen science projects

As the world’s population becomes increasingly urban, understanding the ecology of cities is critical to ensuring the health of urban ecosystems and the people that live in them. Yet designing, implementing, and sustaining... [ view full abstract ]

As the world’s population becomes increasingly urban, understanding the ecology of cities is critical to ensuring the health of urban ecosystems and the people that live in them. Yet designing, implementing, and sustaining effective place-based citizen science programs requires more than just a good idea; these require dedicated human and fiscal resources and clear implementation plans.

The Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) program is an urban ecology research program that has been involved in several citizen science initiatives over its 17-year history. We examine three of these initiatives of varying durations: The Ecology Explorers program (15 years-old), which involves teachers and students in collecting and entering schoolyard ecological data in a web portal; the Urban Tree Community Science initiative (3 years-old), which engages homeowners in reporting data about shade and fruit trees planted in the Phoenix metropolitan area; and the Phoenix Phenology Trail (to be implemented with a group of project partners in spring 2015), which will involve a variety of citizen science groups in observing and understanding plant phenology in Phoenix area mountain parks.

Using various evaluation frameworks we distill key lessons learned in three areas: program design, implementation, and management toward program sustainability. In doing so, we examine issues of participant recruitment, engagement and retention; technology use in program delivery; and the challenges of channeling resources to citizen science ventures. We reflect on how our ideas about effective strategies for engaging citizen scientists have changed over time, and how we have tried to make these changes in our more recent programming. While we focus primarily on formative or process-related aspects of running citizen science programs, we touch on the challenges of defining, monitoring, and measuring learning outcomes.