Volunteers are amazing! How docents re-vitalized a long-term ant survey at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, CA

Long-term datasets of biological species distributions are highly valuable for ecological science, especially for understanding how species respond to global change. Despite the importance of long-term monitoring, support for... [ view full abstract ]

Long-term datasets of biological species distributions are highly valuable for ecological science, especially for understanding how species respond to global change. Despite the importance of long-term monitoring, support for such endeavors can be difficult. Grants for research tend to be three-year terms, rarely include monitoring, and are unlikely to be a good investment for a graduate student as the fieldwork demands are great relative to the likelihood of producing a high impact publication. On the other hand, long-term monitoring does lend itself well to citizen science. Citizen science offers the advantage of crowd-sourcing, such that many volunteers can achieve what would have been impossible for a few investigators. Here we describe the successful transition in 2009 of a long-term monitoring project of biological invasion at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (1994 – 2014) from a graduate student to a citizen science project. The Ant Survey serves as an example of a place-based, small-scale, collaborative participatory research that serves primarily to contribute quality long-term ecological data for scientific investigation, and secondarily an informal education experience for adults of all ages. Here, we share results on key issues in citizen science research in the context of this project: data quality, recruitment, training, retention, learning outcomes, and new methods that have emerged for collecting data as a result of volunteer input. The data obtained now, as a citizen project, are of similar quality to those obtained when graduate students conducted the survey. One advantage to the current method is that it’s all done in one day, whereas it used to take one month. Volunteers report that they enjoy the work and are interested in devising additional opportunities to collect data. We describe some lessons learned from this project in hope that it will spur other researchers and biological preserves to implement similar programs.