Acting Locally and Thinking Globally: Building Regional Community around Citizen Science to Broaden Impacts and to Create a Scalable Model

The mission of the California Academy of Sciences is to explore, explain, and sustain life. Our museum inspires visitors about the natural world, while our scientists document biodiversity and discover new species in hotspots... [ view full abstract ]

The mission of the California Academy of Sciences is to explore, explain, and sustain life. Our museum inspires visitors about the natural world, while our scientists document biodiversity and discover new species in hotspots around the globe. Our citizen science program combines science learning with research, empowering the public to do the same type of work as our scientists, while engaging communities to answer real research questions and connecting people to biodiversity all around them.

To broaden the impacts of our citizen science work, the Academy has actively tried to build and cultivate local community and partnerships around citizen science, striving to create a model of networked biodiversity citizen science and research in San Francisco and the Bay Area that can be scaled globally. Through face-to-face citizen science programs, we are connecting with the public, building understanding of local biodiversity as well as connection to place that can lead to stewardship. With iNaturalist.org, we are fostering both a local and a global network of volunteers and professionals working together to tackle pressing biodiversity and conservation challenges. Through our local efforts and via global outreach, we are encouraging people to document the organisms they see in their everyday life, to help answer research questions, and to come together in “bioblitzes” of parks and open spaces – all with iNaturalist and their smartphones. Strong partnerships with management organizations and local government ensure data collected through our citizen science efforts support both research and conservation outcomes. We have also organized a coalition of citizen science practitioners in the Bay Area to further best practices and research in the region. It is our goal that the collective impact of these efforts will advance biodiversity understanding and conservation locally, and provide a scalable model that can be enacted in other regions around the globe.