Abstract
Outdoor adventure education (OAE) organizations teach interpersonal and wilderness skills in outdoor settings and often include an explicit commitment to environmental learning. Because OAE organizations typically engage young adults in wilderness areas, citizen science projects in this context have the potential to generate data in remote locations and involve younger audiences in citizen science. The author engaged NOLS (formerly the National Outdoor Leadership School) in the Clark’s Nutcracker Project, a contributory citizen science project, to investigate the impacts of habitat decline on a high-elevation bird species in Wyoming. During the first season of the project, I used online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to identify the motivations, benefits, and barriers experienced by participating NOLS instructors and administrators. I found that instructors were most often motivated to participate in the project as a means to improve their environmental studies curriculum. Similarly, I found that instructors most often benefitted from the project’s capacity to serve as a teaching tool by providing a focus for curriculum objectives or fostering increased student awareness and student buy-in. Time limitations, study complexity, disappointment over absence data, and concerns about student data quality were the most often identified barriers to participation. In light of these findings, I recommend that citizen science projects within the OAE context should be very easy to implement and align well with existing curricula. For maximum impact, potential projects should focus on a readily visible study subject, be defined by a compelling need, and ideally connect to students’ lives beyond the backcountry.
Highlights
Citizen science (CS), which involves members of the public in authentic scientific research, has the potential to generate important ecological datasets and, in some cases, influence the values and behaviors of participants (Ellwood, Crimmins, and Miller-Rushing 2017; M cKinley et al 2017; Stepenuck and Green 2015)
Though this research is exploratory, the rich information that was generated through interviews and online questionnaires sheds light on the experience of gateway participants within a new CS audience: The Outdoor Adventure Education (OAE) community
To provide a starting point for future CS projects in this setting, I compare the motivations, barriers, and benefits I identified among outdoor adventure educators to those described among other CS audiences and offer a set of preliminary best practices based on these findings
Summary
Citizen science (CS), which involves members of the public in authentic scientific research, has the potential to generate important ecological datasets and, in some cases, influence the values and behaviors of participants (Ellwood, Crimmins, and Miller-Rushing 2017; M cKinley et al 2017; Stepenuck and Green 2015). CS datasets are generated abundantly in certain ecosystems and are limited or non-existent in others. Many successful CS projects focus on urban or backyard habitats and are capable of generating scientific data at an unprecedented scale (Bonney et al 2009a; McCaffrey 2005). One promising strategy to increase youth participation in CS may be to design projects tailored to youth organizations (Bonney et al 2009a; Dickinson et al 2012; Purcell et al 2012)
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