Center for Community & Citizen Science Blog
Congratulations to Peggy and DeAnn on a Successful Summit!
by Michael P. Montgomery
On October 1, the Center’s CCS Innovator Fellow, Peggy Harte, traveled
with DeAnn Tenhunfeld to Sacramento to present at a California
Expanded Learning Summit for after-school educators and
administrators. Their talk, “Engaging Students in STEM through
Citizen Science,” discussed citizen science’s growing role in
elementary classrooms, and was attended by nearly 50
participants.
Student Opportunities for 2019-2020
For undergraduates looking to gain experience in science and environmental education, and community and citizen science, we’re happy to offer a few ways to engage. Contact Ryan Meyer to learn more, and join our team!
Photo Essay: Rattlesnake Creek Dam Removal and Restoration
With support from the Open
Rivers Fund, a program run by the Resources Legacy Fund, our
Dams and Watershed Health team,
Heidi Ballard, Ryan Meyer, and Chris Jadallah traveled to
Missoula, Montana in July 2019 to observe and participate in
the environmental monitoring associated with the removal of
Rattlesnake Creek Dam. Through meetings and hands-on experience,
we got an up-close look at both the promise and the challenges of
monitoring collaborations focused on dam removal.
Rattlesnake Creek Dam Removal
Working with local partners in Missoula, Montana
Rattlesnake Creek Dam
Originally built to provide water for the City of Missoula in 1904, the Rattlesnake Creek Dam was first constructed as a wooden structure and later converted into a concrete one. After problems with Giardia contamination in the early 1980s, a private utility took the dam offline and the City of Missoula converted to groundwater as its primary source for drinking water.
MPAs and Citizen Science in California
Citizen and Community Science plays a special role in efforts to conserve and manage California’s ocean and coastal resources. There is a huge diversity of projects and programming operating up and down the coast, which engage the public in science and monitoring, often with direct connections to policy and management processes.
Engaging Educators in the City Nature Challenge
The Center collaborated with the California Naturalist Program, educators in the Woodland Joint Unified School District, and a variety of local nature centers and reserves to encourage participation in the Sacramento City Nature Challenge. Despite being its first year participating in this global competition (as one of more than 160 cities worldwide), over 500 people in the Sacramento region logged 9,798 observations of over 1,200 unique species using iNaturalist.
Q&A with Faculty Director Heidi Ballard
By Julie Gipple
This interview was originally published in Breakthroughs, the magazine of the University of California, Berkeley College of Natural Resources, under the title, “Q&A: When Science is Social— Alumna Heidi Ballard discusses opportunities for education and research”.
What was your path to where
you are today, and when did you first become involved with
community and citizen science?
During my years in higher education, I became fascinated with ethnobotany—the study of cultural uses of plants—as well as the emerging fields of conservation biology and sustainable development. Across all these fields, I was most drawn to studies that involved collaborative monitoring, where different groups of stakeholders—environmentalists, resource-dependent communities, scientists, and agencies—all came together to collect data.
Final Report: Community and Citizen Science at the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
In late 2017, the Center for
Community and Citizen Science began an assessment of public
participation in research throughout the University of California Division of
Agriculture and Natural Resources. The final report,
“Community and Citizen Science at the UC Division of Agriculture
and Natural Resources” is now available! Authored by our
Executive Director Ryan Meyer and California Naturalist Interim
Director Sabrina Drill, the report examines the status of
community and citizen science at UC ANR and provides a roadmap
for increasing UC ANR’s capacity for CCS.
New Report: Evaluating Knowledge to Support Climate Action
Governments and communities around
the world are working to reduce their carbon footprints and
mitigate the effects of climate change, but in some communities,
climate action plans are stalling. A new report, “Evaluating
Knowledge to Support Climate Action,” prepared by the
Independent Advisory Committee for Applied Climate Assessment
(IAC) with contributions from our Executive Director, Ryan Meyer,
examines what it would take to develop a dynamic assessment
process that helps affected jurisdictions, communities, and
organizations establish pathways for climate action. Its
recommendations are an important input to ongoing climate
assessment and research in the federal government and elsewhere.
CitSci 2019: Where to Find Us
We’re looking forward to the upcoming Citizen Science Association (CSA) conference, right around the corner! Come catch up with us and our work at the events listed below. We are also excited to host a youth-focused community and citizen science happy hour alongside the Education Working Group on Thursday March 14th, from 6:00-8:00PM. It will be an informal evening of networking and discussing the involvement of young people in citizen and community science. See the image below for more information, and RSVP here.
City Nature Challenge Comes to Sacramento Region
For the first time ever, the Sacramento Region will be participating in the City Nature Challenge. We will be competing with more than 160 cities all over the world to see who can catalogue the most nature in just 4 days! We think that joining this global effort to discover local biodiversity through citizen science is a great opportunity for the Center, and for the region.
New Publication
Engagement in science through citizen science: Moving beyond data collection.
We are excited to share a new
publication in Science Education entitled
“Engagement in science through citizen science: Moving beyond
data collection.” This article was written by Tina B.
Phillips, Bruce V. Lewenstein, Rick Bonney, and our faculty
director Heidi Ballard.
Sara Ludwick Presents Award-winning Poster at AGU
Congratulations to Sara Ludwick,
whose poster at the AGU fall meeting entitled
“Achieving Education Goals with Climate-related Community and
Citizen Science,” received an Outstanding Student
Presentation Award! Read on for Sara’s reflections on the
experience.
New White Paper:
Science Identity and Agency in Community and Citizen Science: Evidence & Potential
The National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering and Medicine has released a new report that takes a
deep dive into research on learning through citizen science.
Beyond the many challenges and recommendations it details, the
report is a strong affirmation that citizen science can support
both science learning and research goals. We’re proud that our
work has informed this effort, including an Academy-commissioned
white paper and keynote talk by Faculty Director Heidi Ballard,
and Center Alums Emily Harris and Colin Dixon.
New Comment in Nature Sustainability: To co-produce or not to co-produce
“To co-produce or not to co-produce”, a Comment in Nature Sustainability, was recently published. Ryan Meyer, our Center’s Executive Director, contributed as part of the “Science of Useful Science” working group of the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC).
Welcome Maryam Ghadiri!
The Center for Community and
Citizen Science is excited to welcome Maryam Ghadiri as the new
postdoctoral fellow on the LEARN CitSci project. Maryam was
recently the director of education and research at the Environmental Learning Center
(ELC), a non-profit organization in Vero Beach, Florida. She
worked with educators and ecologists to design, implement and
evaluate different environmental education and outreach
programs.
CITY NATURE CHALLENGE
April 26th 2019- April 29th 2019
The City Nature Challenge began as a nature-observation competition between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County in 2016, organized around simple charge: “which city can find the most nature?” Since then, the competition has expanded rapidly, and this year more than 120 cities will participate worldwide!
