Abstract
Citizen science-based approaches to monitor the natural environment tend to be bimodal in maturity. Older and established studies such as the Audubon’s Christmas bird count and Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) have thousands of participants across decades of observations, while less mature citizen science projects have shorter lifespans often focused on local or regional observations with tens or hundreds of participants. For the latter, it can be difficult to transition into a more mature and sustainable citizen science-based research project. This research focuses on this transition by evaluating CrowdHydrology (ca. 2010), a citizen science project that has transitioned from a regional to national network. The CrowdHydrology network asks citizens to send in text messages of water levels in streams and lakes, which has resulted in 16,294 observations submitted by over 8,000 unique participants. Using water level data and participation records from CrowdHydrology, we evaluate the expansion and citizen participation from a regional to national citizen science initiative. We identify barriers to entry to participation and evaluate why some citizen science observation stations are popular while others are not. We explore our chosen contributory program model for CrowdHydrology and the influence this model has had on long-term participation. Results demonstrate a highly variable rate of contributions of citizen scientists and address why many of our observations are from one-time participants. Finally, we address the future expansion of the CrowdHydrology network by evaluating current successful monitoring locations and recent expansion of interest from watershed groups to participate in the project.
Highlights
In developing new methods for analyzing and monitoring natural hazards, citizen science can be a powerful tool to collect critical environmental observations for both research and long-term monitoring
This paper evaluates participation in CrowdHydrology, a hydrology-based citizen science program that has successfully made it past the initial network development phase and is reaching maturity
Once a citizen scientist chooses to participate, their text message is sent via their mobile phone to a central computer server
Summary
In developing new methods for analyzing and monitoring natural hazards, citizen science can be a powerful tool to collect critical environmental observations for both research and long-term monitoring. With the advancements in computing and seamless flow of information between professional scientists, the scientific field has benefited by exponential growth (Szalay and Gray, 2006). It can be argued this growth further increases the gap between professional scientists and some sectors of the general public (Gauchat, 2012). While opportunities in citizen science-based observation networks are not new, it is time scientists recognize and learn how to tap into the potential
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