Determining the Willingness to Pay for Ecosystem Service Restoration: A High-School Citizen Science Project

In this story, I will discuss a project where a high school biology teacher and her students engaged in a citizen science partnership with a local watershed group. In this collaborative citizen science project, students... [ view full abstract ]

In this story, I will discuss a project where a high school biology teacher and her students engaged in a citizen science partnership with a local watershed group. In this collaborative citizen science project, students collected data to determine willingness to pay for ecosystem service restoration. The teacher and students maintained control of the research while scientists from a local state university and members of the watershed group served as consultants. Students, who were enrolled in an honors course, took on this project with a goal of generating useable information regarding a local environmental issue. The teacher made possible this research with the goal of integrating quantitative social and natural science data into a real life environmental problem and issue.

The result of this collaboration was a peer-reviewed manuscript and a series of presentations making data available to decision-makers involved in the restoration project. In this discussion, I will share the classroom products and discuss how this type of data collection can be balanced with a formal science curriculum to both educate and motivate students. Furthermore, I will reflect on student, scientist, and partner comments framed around opportunities and barriers to conduction authentic research in a formal high school classroom.