Overcoming the Taxonomic ID Bottleneck in Water Quality Biomonitoring Using a Dynamic Online Visual Resource

Reliable species identification is a critical activity in many citizen science projects. Training volunteers to observe relevant characteristics that support identification with confidence, accuracy and efficiency is a... [ view full abstract ]

Reliable species identification is a critical activity in many citizen science projects. Training volunteers to observe relevant characteristics that support identification with confidence, accuracy and efficiency is a perennial challenge. To address this participation barrier in a targeted way, we developed an open educational resource to specifically address the needs of people learning to do stream insect identification for community-based biomonitoring projects and water quality assessment activities in environmental educational programming.

The aquatic macroinvertebrate collection was developed in a cross-disciplinary collaboration with partners from entomology, computer science, and the learning sciences, and with valuable design input and participation from regional environmental education and watershed groups. The tool takes advantage of dynamic high-resolution online image environments to create a new kind of annotated multimedia field guide. Users can explore microscope-quality images of stream insects taken from a museum collection of voucher specimens, and zoom in with extraordinary detail to learn about the diagnostic characteristics that differentiate groups and determine pollution tolerance values.

Our talk will describe the design-based research approach that we used to define, and iteratively refine the tool with stakeholders. We’ll also share findings from our evaluation, which compared learners’ use of, engagement with, and opinions about traditional print-based dichotomous keys, illustrated flash cards, and our digital aquatic macroinvertebrate collection to identify unknown insects. Our discussion will center on the tradeoffs between static text-centered materials and dynamic visual learning resources to support volunteers’ identification work. Lastly, we suggest implications for the field regarding how new kinds of image-rich online platforms might change the ways that information is shared, observational practices are supported, and training of citizen scientists is facilitated.