Empowering Citizens at the Poles.

Abstract

Empowering Citizens at the Poles Lauren Farmer I’m lucky enough to be employed as a polar guide, spending a majority of my year in both the Arctic and Antarctic on small expedition vessels. Recently, this “dream job” has become even more rewarding with my involvement in developing and implementing citizen science programs on board these ships, which range across the most fragile ecosystems on earth. It has long been recognized that from a data-collection point of view, polar regions are under-sampled. Polar tour vessels have the potential to address this relative lack of access and so historically, polar tour companies would provide berth space to researchers to carry out their own work. While this was certainly valuable, it was limited in scale of impact, and rarely engaged the guests on board with an opportunity to assist. Over the years, various efforts were made to create more participatory data collection programs, but these often failed to gain much momentum due to a number of unique challenges our industry faces. Some of these challenges are a constant rotation of expedition staff coming and going from the vessel, leading to a lack of consistency in how the program is run, or whether it is run at all. Additionally, pre-existing cruise itineraries can be limited in the time available for additional activities such as citizen science, as well as a difficulty in being relied upon for projects that require location-specific data collection, as our whereabouts are often dictated entirely by weather and ice. In addition, companies would start their own in-house projects, meaning that projects would rarely if ever be implemented on more than one vessel. This meant that these projects could never take advantage of the biggest asset of citizen science on polar expedition cruise vessels; the size of the fleet. While there was potentially a challenge in asking competing commercial enterprises to collaborate on science projects, the reach of such a large and extremely experienced fleet of ice vessels makes the potential of the collective effort uniquely powerful. In early 2017, myself and 4 other guides (Alex Cowan, Annette Bombosch, Bob Gilmore and Ted Cheeseman) began to seriously think about how polar expedition vessels could have a real impact. We, the collective fleet of tour vessels, spend five months a year in Antarctica and another five in the Arctic—regions that are logistically difficult and expensive for research vessels to access in the way that we do. Additionally, many of our expedition staff are trained natural scientists with research backgrounds. The natural progression of our conversation was a more coordinated effort leading to the development of science programs that would provide real value and trusted data to researchers while providing an enhanced travel experience for our guests. The Polar Citizen Science Collective got to work and was officially launched in early 2018. This non-profit is an effort to grow citizen science programs in the polar tourism industry and to create efficiency around the development, implementation and data delivery of these programs. Rather than each operator “re-inventing the wheel” and setting [End Page 11] up their own programs, the Collective works together with scientists to thoughtfully develop a wide variety of projects, which can require minimal, moderate or significant effort. The scientist or scientific organization drives the research question and protocols, while the Collective works to integrate the project into the tour operator’s existing program. The Collective can be as involved as the operator desires, but the standard is to deliver all the necessary information and training required and then provide ongoing support throughout the season. During the data collection phase, the scientist receives regular updates from the team in the field and can provide appreciated feedback to the participants. At the end of the season or in regular intervals, the data collected is delivered to the scientist for analysis. With existing programs spanning ornithology, marine biology, microplastics, atmospherics, glaciology, and sea ice, expedition vessels are already proving successful as respected platforms for science. Currently, 15% of the polar cruise industry’s operators participate in our citizen science programs with a participation rate of 30% of cruise passengers. With growing enthusiasm from tour operators...