Caren Cooper

The goal of our Integrating Research and Practice proposal is to broaden engagement in informal learning in the context of large-scale participatory science projects to include identity groups historically excluded and underrepresented in STEM and informal STEM. Forms of participatory science that are remarkably successful at engaging hundreds of thousands of participants in informal learning environments face a diversity crisis. The overwhelming majority of participants in these types of projects, typically referred to as citizen science, are White, highly educated, and wealthy. Our aim is to provide project leadership teams (practitioners) with the knowledge, awareness, and resources to modify their projects with practices that support inclusion, equity, and accessibility. Our plan builds on products produced with prior NSF-AISL funding of the Inclusive, Diverse, Equitable, Accessible, Large-scale (IDEAL) Participatory Science working group. We will beta-test the IDEAL Guide, tutorial, and workshops through an iterative cycle: a) provide professional development to project leadership teams, b) provide mini-grants for projects to implement IDEAL practices, c) support a community of practice model, d) assess the outcomes of practitioner training and their uptake of IDEAL practices, e) assess impacts on participant diversity and learning, and f) update the IDEAL Guide. Pilot-testing will begin with two projects that have hierarchical governance models: Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count and iNaturalist’s City Nature Challenge, and then extend further with an open call. Mini-grants will cover activities such as adding diverse representation to project governance, adjusting project designs to center at the margins, and building reciprocity into project outcomes. Our assessments will focus on practitioner learning and subsequent behaviors to change projects and will focus on participant learning, particularly science identity and belonging.

The Department of Forestry & Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University fully supports the 2022 REPI Challenge proposal from the NC Sentinel Landscape Partnership, “Advancing Capacity for a Resilient NC Sentinel Landscape: The Connection Between Military Readiness, Working Lands, and Nature Based Solutions.” The Department of Forestry & Environmental Resources, which includes my Public Science Lab, housed in the College of Natural Resources, provides access to a Natural Resources Library, geographic information systems labs, remote sensing labs, statistical consulting, as well as traditional computing facilities and cutting-edge software. The Department of Forestry & Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University endorses this proposal and commits to supporting the NC Sentinel Landscape Partnership to protect North Carolina’s natural resources while providing for military readiness and nature-based solution to climate change in the Eastern North Carolina Sentinel Landscape.

Microbes feature prominently in many religious traditions, including the Judeo-Christian traditions. But no holistic work has considered the place of microbiomes in any religious tradition. This award will fund Aminah Al-Attas Bradford to work for two years at NC State finishing up a study of microbiomes in Christianity. This work is at the interface of microbiome studies, Theology, History, Ecology and Public Science and it is anticipated that Aminah will build on connections at NC State across these disciplines in her work. In addition, it will fund Aminah to teach at NC State. The classes she will teach will be decided through further conversations. One likely class would consider (for graduate and undergraduate students) the role of religious institutions in science communication in the United States and more generally. In this course, Aminah would draw upon her own background but would also bring in scholars from throughout the region. A second course might more specifically focus on the view of microbes in Christianity and its historic and modern consequences. These courses would be taught in collaboration with the Department of Applied Ecology and the Public Science Cluster.

Most participants in citizen science projects are white, affluent, and highly educated. Consequently, the scientific conclusions about biodiversity and ecological health contain sampling bias and inequities in participation itself is a type of distributional environmental injustice that hampers sustainability efforts. The Inclusive, Diverse, Equitable, Accessible, Large-scale (IDEAL) Working Group, led by Cooper, is completing guidance to help citizen science leadership teams (re-)design inclusive projects. This proposal is to carryout the IDEAL guidance with two citizen science projects that use digital technologies (AI and 3-D graphics) and assess the effectiveness of the guidance on project team leadership and project planning.

This IUSE:EHR-ICT proposal seeks to build the capacity for establishing citizen science communities that engage students in meaningful learning experiences in and around the Nation’s largest Historically Black College or University (HBCU). Citizen Science refers to efforts to involve volunteers from across different sectors of society, stakeholder groups, and communities in the scientific process. North Carolina State University (NCSU) has been a leader in efforts to bring Citizen Science into university classrooms through Active Learning (Bonwell & Eison, 1991) pedagogies. As collaborators on this proposed project their experience and expertise will be leveraged in capacity building efforts at North Carolina A&T State University (NC A&T SU) focused in four key areas: training, relationship & awareness building, information technology infrastructure, and needs assessment for scaling-up the project. Initial capacity building efforts within NC A&T SU will be centered in the Sociology and Psychology Programs within the College of Health and Human Sciences (CHSS) and extend outward through partnerships with other programs in the CHHS, other Colleges and Divisions and student organizations within the University, and the broader East Greensboro, NC community. Among other things, funds from the grant will support the training of members of the NC A&T SU research team in the use of citizen science IT platforms and active learning pedagogies. These faculty members will in turn become ambassadors who will host workshops and events that build the capacity of additional faculty collaborators to integrate citizen science-based active learning approaches into their courses. Evaluation of the capacity building efforts will be assessed via rates of participation in capacity building events, implementation of these approaches into university classrooms, and formative evaluations using focus group and surveys.

Ninety-seven of the one hundred counties in North Carolina have at least one community water system with leaded infrastructure. Collectively, these systems serve 10 million people. In 20 counties, 80% or more of the water systems reported leaded infrastructure, serving a total of over one million North Carolinians. Unfortunately, water systems do not have records with sufficient detail to identify highest risk areas at finer spatial scales. Furthermore, there is virtually no data, at any scale, about the privately owned portions of the water transportation systems, namely the privately owned portion of the service line and the household premise plumbing. This proposal addresses the problem that leaded drinking water infrastructure poses a significant health risk across NC. Water utilities cannot properly manage water lead levels without sufficient data about leaded premise plumbing and lead in tap water at households. The EPA funded a project to create Crowd the Tap, a citizen science project in which households share information about their drinking water infrastructure. We propose a Citizen Science Internship program at Shaw University in which student interns function as ambassadors for Crowd the Tap, carrying out direct outreach (in accordance with COVID safety protocols) to priority communities in order to fill data gaps particularly for the DEQs Needs Assessment, NGO/CBO lead mitigation programs, and a statistical model to reliably predict household risk of lead.

Ninety-seven of the one hundred counties in North Carolina have at least one community water system with leaded infrastructure. Collectively, these systems serve 10 million people. In 20 counties, 80% or more of the water systems reported leaded infrastructure, serving a total of over one million North Carolinians. Unfortunately, water systems do not have records with sufficient detail to identify highest risk areas at finer spatial scales. Furthermore, there is virtually no data, at any scale, about the privately owned portions of the water transportation systems, namely the privately owned portion of the service line and the household premise plumbing. This proposal addresses the problem that leaded drinking water infrastructure poses a significant health risk across NC. Water utilities cannot properly manage water lead levels without sufficient data about leaded premise plumbing and lead in tap water at households. The EPA funded a project to create Crowd the Tap, a citizen science project in which households share information about their drinking water infrastructure. We propose a Citizen Science Internship program at Shaw University in which student interns function as ambassadors for Crowd the Tap, carrying out direct outreach (in accordance with COVID safety protocols) to priority communities in order to fill data gaps particularly for the DEQs Needs Assessment, NGO/CBO lead mitigation programs, and a statistical model to reliably predict household risk of lead.

“Citizen science” refers to a broad spectrum of ways in which scientists and members of the public collaborate in scientific discovery, and scientists and practitioners engaged in the use of citizen science isa rapidly growing part of the scientific community. However, because citizen science can be initiated and funded outside of traditional institutions and conventional regulatory oversight mechanisms, and creates new circumstances overlooked by regulatory oversight, the field has an ethics gap. The gap presents an opportunity to create and disseminate new frameworks, building an ethical culture at the outset of an emerging field to proactively address issues as they emerge. We focus on the common denominator to nearly all citizen science projects: volunteer data collection and use. We propose to survey current and ideal practices and the use of human-centered design to create ethical culture in collaboration with the Citizen Science Association (CSA) with the goals of: (1) Identifying and guiding responsible research by practitioners in the emerging field of citizen science, and (2) building CSA’s capacity to establish and maintain ethical norms in a burgeoning field.

The goal of this proposed Research in Service to Practice proposal is to develop evidence-based principles to guide citizen science project owners in the coordinated management of project participants within the SciStarter landscape. SciStarter is a repository of over 1,500 citizen science projects. Through an AISL-Pathways award, the researchers developed SciStarter 2.0 tools which can be used to study and coordinate recruitment and retention strategies across projects. Coordinated management has the potential to deepen volunteer learning and growth and benefit project goals because it can address across-project skew, evolving motivations, seasonal gaps, untapped synergies across projects, and other unanticipated factors that cannot be addressed via management within project silos. The researchers designed SciStarter for embedded tracking of participation dynamics in a landscape of projects. They propose to expand embedded assessment to measure scientific, learning, and conservation outcomes and their links to participation dynamics within and across projects. Through social network analysis, they will describe patterns of bridges, ties, and distances among projects based on the cross-over of participants. They also propose qualitative research to understand project managers? perceptions of SciStarter and the costs and benefits of coordinated management of citizen scientists. Ultimately, the proposed study will lead to guidance to create synergies and mutually beneficial outcomes among projects by broader adoption of the newly developed SciStarter 2.0 tools.

Citizen science projects number in the thousands and even a single project can engage millions of people. Yet, citizen science is not engaging much beyond highly educated, affluent white participants. The goals of this Conference proposal are to address the urgent need for diversity and inclusion in citizen science. Our primary goal, and strategic impact for the informal STEM learning field, is to create a framework to guide projects in addressing issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in institution-driven, large-scale, contributory citizen science projects. Our secondary goal is to extend the effort by preparing a proposal for a Research Coordination Network on inclusion in citizen science. To achieve these goals, we will assemble people with highly varied perspectives, lived experiences, and career experiences for a series of virtual workshops over several months.