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Interest in citizen science is growing among both scientists and community groups who are interested in creating natural resource management projects. Such projects have the potential to result in social learning, which can further reinforce resource stewardship. Data to study this learning process, however, remain scant. Using transcripts from four different natural resource management projects, we use discourse analysis to investigate the discursive practice between project scientists and community members in the development of models that were used to test ideas and subsequently modified with citizen collected data. We found that only a portion of the discussion focused on knowledge building and that only experts provided challenges to ideas being discussed. Subsequently to these challenges, however, a greater proportion of knowledge co-creation occurred.

Climate change education is of great interest to many in higher education. What is missing, however, is a sense of how students view climate change especially with respect to specific impacts such as changes to food systems. We designed a survey, which focused on climate change, food systems, and GMOs. We administered this survey in a large introductory undergraduate environmental science class and compared responses to demographic information. We found that students were knowledgeable in some areas more than others; especially when considering climate change drivers and mitigating factors. We also found that students were largely concerned about climate change impacts and wanted to understand the socio-environmental solutions that might help to mitigate potential impact. These same students, however, seemed optimistic that solutions could be found and implemented. Finally, while little demographic trends emerged, students who were more knowledgeable in one area (e.g., GMOS) tended to be knowledgeable in other areas.

In STEM learning focused on science literacy, socioscientific issues instruction is often proposed as a way to bolster students’ civic engagement, however few studies in science education have explicitly examined this connection. We define civic engagement as the work of influencing legitimately public matters using means within the existing political structure. In this work we investigate students’ feelings of self-efficacy for this type of civic engagement in the context of four socioscientific issues (prairie dog conservation, food insecurity, biofuels and water conservation). This study was in the context of a large enrollment introductory science college course, where students used a structured decision-making process to examine alternative policy solutions to complex socioscientific issues. We qualitatively examined students’ response about their perception of the importance of the issue, their self-efficacy in exploring actions they could take to impact the issue, and the effectiveness of those actions. We found that students’ ideas about impact and effectiveness varied across the four different issues contexts due to students’ sense of the issues’ importance and scale. Generally, students’ ideas about actions they could take to impact the issue were narrow and rarely included political actions like voting. We also found post instruction increases in students’ civic engagement attitudes and skills related to social justice, interpersonal and problem-solving skills and political awareness. Finally, we suggest that socioscientific instruction must have an explicit connection to policy-level decisions and reveal how individual actions can influence the societal system. Our course using a structured decision-making process in the context of socioscientific issues is one model to help students make these connections.

Forests provide valuable ecosystem services to individuals that live near them and visit them. However, many forests, especially in highly developed areas, are specifically managed for resource conservation purposes. A common practice for conservation is restricting access to people to ensure minimal human-driven harm. While the restriction of human access to a forest increases its biological ecosystem services, it limits its cultural services and may reduce the public&rsquo, s perceived value of the forest. To investigate how access influences the perceived value of a forest, two forests in the state of New Jersey, USA, were compared. The forests, the Rutgers Ecological Preserve (RUEP) and Hutcheson Memorial Forest (HMF), represent accessible and inaccessible forests respectively. The study reported here evaluated the effects of visitation and accessibility on public perception of both sites. Residents near the RUEP and HMF, and visitors of both sites, were surveyed (n = 48). The results of the surveys demonstrated that the frequency of visitation and community location can have noticeable influences on a number of variables, including one&rsquo, s belief that forests provide important services and the thought that protected areas take away from an individual&rsquo, s freedom to use the area. A more positive view of the forests was present in those who visited the public forest most often.

In this short communication, we present data that suggests messages that incorporate identity frames can be an asset in engagement and support for greenspace development.

Citizen science (CS) has been an increasingly utilized means by which scientists leverage members of the public to increase the amount of data collected and analyzed. However, the underrepresentation of individuals from certain socio-cultural groups can have consequences that can manifest in the scientific outcomes of those CS projects such as biases in the data. Additionally, this underrepresentation can potentially affect long-term viability and support of CS as a community of practice. CS programs that promote greater inclusivity would likely provide opportunities for communities to define, investigate, and address pressing issues in collaboration with professional scientists. In this paper we discuss a CS project that sought to include underrepresented communities in Baltimore, Maryland using Pandya’s framework for inclusive CS. While the project met all of its scientific research goals, translating the CS for broader social outcomes in the community proved challenging. Here we highlight perspectives from local community members and research personnel about the barriers to CS engagement, challenges in translating scientific outcomes to social justice efforts, and opportunities to address these barriers in CS program development and design.

Environmental restoration projects are widely used as a means to reverse the degradation and damage done to an ecosystem by a range of different disturbances. Literature shows that engaging the public in restoration projects is important to long-term success; therefore, it is important to understand who participates in stewardship of these projects and why. Here, researchers investigate what aspects of individuals’ environmental knowledge, environmental identity, demographics, views of and engagement in their community, and current civic stewardship might predict willingness to engage in restoration stewardship activities. This project takes place in the context of an ongoing maritime restoration planting experiment in the Jamaica Bay region of New York City, New York, U.S. The study authors developed a questionnaire with scales of the metrics above. Researchers found that individuals who were most willing to engage in environmental restoration stewardship had high sense of personal agency (i.e., their actions can have impact), saw value in their stewardship contributions for their community, were older, and were very knowledgeable about environmental issues. Additionally, the desire to preserve local biodiversity was not correlated with engagement in environmental restoration programs, whereas a desire to help and improve the local community was positively correlated. These results suggest a need to reframe how scientists and practitioners approach and discuss future restoration projects with community members to garner support for these types of programs.

Urban green spaces have long been studied in terms of their impact on human and environmental health and well-being. We collected and analyzed preliminary survey data for central New Jersey municipalities relating to participants’ perceptions of public green spaces, quality, and usage and relating these factors to environmental knowledge and literacy. Results have yielded new insights into the role of urban canopy cover in differing levels of environmental literacy. Included in this, persons living in areas with higher canopy cover have higher levels of environmental literacy (p=0.0338) and higher educational attainment (p=0.049). Persons with access to higher quality parks also exhibited higher levels of educational attainment (p=0.0475).This relationship and others collectively would support there being multiple types of environmental literacy, with diverse sources, impacts, and outcomes on individuals and communities. Work done to this point has not addressed this idea, nor sought to study the connections between EL and all influencing socio-cultural and landscape factors.

The cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi are an excellent model group with which to study adaptive radiation and speciation; due to the vast number of individual species, large variation in feeding adaptations and behaviours, and relatively recent divergence are found. Males of many cichlid species will obtain and defend lek-like territories, where they court potential mates in addition to foraging for food. Aspects of territory quality warrant investigation because of the relationship between reproductive success and territory defence success. In this study, we tested whether the presence of a small or large food resource had any effect on the preference of a gravid female for a potential mate. The results of this experiment suggest that the presence of a large food resource increases the attractiveness of a male to a potential mate. This may suggest that the presence of food alone may not be the most important factor, or there may be a threshold amount over which females are attracted. These results indicate that certain aspects of territory quality such as habitat type or proximity to a food resource may play a role in both intersexual and intrasexual selection mechanisms: perhaps even driving and possibly accelerating the speciation of certain lineages of cichlid fishes. Resume Les cichlides du lac Malawi constituent un excellent modele de groupe pour etudier la radiation adaptative et la speciation, en raison du grand nombre d'especes, de la grande variete des adaptations et des comportements alimentaires, et de divergences relativement recentes. Les mâles de nombreuses especes de cichlides acquierent et defendent un territoire comparable a un lek, ou ils font la cour a d'eventuels partenaires et aussi cherchent a s'alimenter. Certains aspects de la qualite d'un territoire justifient les recherches en raison de la relation entre le succes de la reproduction et celui de la defense du territoire. Dans cette etude, nous avons voulu verifier si la presence d'une source de nourriture plus ou moins importante a un effet quelconque sur la preference d'une femelle gravide pour un partenaire potentiel. Les resultats de cette experience suggerent que la presence d'une importante source de nourriture augmente l'attractivite d'un mâle pour une partenaire potentielle. Cela peut suggerer que la presence de nourriture seule peut ne pas etre le facteur le plus important ou qu'il peut exister un seuil a partir duquel les femelles sont attirees. Nos resultats indiquent que certains aspects de la qualite d'un territoire, tels que le type d'habitat ou la proximite d'une source de nourriture, peuvent jouer un role dans les mecanismes de selection aussi bien inter- qu'intrasexuels et qu'ils favorisent ou accelerent peut-etre meme la speciation de certaines lignees de cichlides.

The article Student representations and conceptions of ecological versus socialsciences in a conservation course, written by Amanda E. Sorensen, Jeffrey Brown, Ashley Alred, Joseph J. Fontaine and Jenny M. Dauer, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 13 February 2020 with open access.

Public greenspaces provide an opportunity for community members to engage with the outdoors. In many locations, however, parks are under used. In an effort to gauge the potential for outdoor interaction and ecosystem education, we conducted a survey of residents from a central New Jersey, USA, county. Our correlation analysis indicated that park use could be related to socioeconomics and in particular education, environmental literacy, pet ownership, outdoor enjoyment and preferred environment. Variables relating to mood and other personal characteristics were more strongly associated with individual identity characteristics. Through multivariate analyses, we offer an organizing framework that can help tailor outdoor greenspace improvement/restoration and programming to identity categories. These categories are a combination of where an individual lives, enjoyment of the outdoors, education and socio-economics, sense of community, institutional trust, and pet ownership.

In response to recent educational imperatives in the United States, modeling and systems thinking have been identified as being critical for science learning. In this paper, we investigate models in the classroom from two important perspectives: (1) from the teacher perspective to understand how teachers perceive models and use models in the classroom and (2) from the students perspective to understand how student use model-based reasoning to represent their understanding in a classroom setting. Qualitative data collected from 19 teachers who attended a professional development workshop in the northeastern United States indicate that while teachers see the value in teaching to think with models (i.e., during inquiry practices), they tend to use models mostly as communication tools in the classroom. Quantitative data collected about the modeling practices of 42 middle school students who worked collaboratively in small groups (4–5 students) using a computer modeling program indicated that students tended to engage in more mechanistic and function-related thinking with time as they reasoned about a complex system. Furthermore, students had a typified trajectory of first adding and then next paring down ideas in their models. Implications for science education are discussed.

Emergence of invasive vector species and the diseases they carry present a clear danger to the public as well as a challenge for scientists and experts to control effectively. Given the urgent need to address this phenomenon, we suggest that desired public action towards these invasive vectors can be motivated through intentional framing in science communication. In this paper, we sought to evaluate the effect of framing about ZIKV (Zika virus) on reported willingness to comply with mosquito prevention action. Post framing intervention, we found a significant increase (N=26, pBy methodically investigating best communication practices, this study and others can help practitioners mobilize communities to address large-scale ecological problems. Additionally, the principles outlined here may be transferrable to other communication efforts about ecological issues outside of ZIKV and mosquitoes.

Citizen science programs are useful tools for collecting important environmental science data. To ensure data quality, however, it must be shown that data collected by volunteers can produce reliable results. We engaged 143 volunteers over four years to map and estimate abundance of invasive plants in New York and New Jersey parklands. We found that off trail abundance of only a few of our targeted invasive species were positively correlated with on trail abundance. Our results support that citizen science programs can be a useful and sometimes a much needed addition to environmental science protocols.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been developed to overcome barriers including students in research. However, there are few examples of CUREs that take place in a conservation and natural resource context with students engaging in field research. Here, we highlight the development of a conservation-focused CURE integrated to a research program, research benefits, student self-assessment of learning, and perception of the CURE. With the additional data, researchers were able to refine species distribution models and facilitate management decisions. Most students reported gains in their scientific skills, felt they had engaged in meaningful, real-world research. In student reflections on how this experience helped clarify their professional intentions, many reported being more likely to enroll in graduate programs and seek employment related to science. Also interesting was all students reported being more likely to talk with friends, family, or the public about wildlife conservation issues after participating, indicating that courses like this can have effects beyond the classroom, empowering students to be advocates and translators of science. Field-based, conservation-focused CUREs can create meaningful conservation and natural resource experiences with authentic scientific teaching practices.

Effective communication of science to the general public is important for numerous reasons, including support for policy, funding, informed public decision making, among others. Prior research has found that scientists participating in public policy and public communication must frame their communication efforts in order to connect with audiences. A frame is the mechanism that individuals use to understand and interpret the world around them. Framing can encourage specific interpretations and reference points for a particular issue or event; especially when meaning is negotiated between the media and public audiences. In this study, we looked at the effect of framing within an environmental conservation context. To do this we had survey respondents rank common issues, among them being environmental conservation, from most important to least important for the government to address. We framed environmental conservation using three synonymous terms (environmental security, ecosystem services, and environmental quality) to assess whether there was an effect on rankings dependent on how we framed environmental conservation. We also investigated the effect of individuals’ personality characteristics (identity frame) on those environmental conservation rankings. We found that individuals who self-identified as environmentalist were positively associated with ranking highly (most important) environmental conservation when it was framed as either environmental quality or ecosystem services, but not when it was framed as environmental security. Conversely, those individuals who did not rank themselves highly as self-identified environmentalists were positively associated with environmental conservation when it was framed as environmental security. This research suggests that framing audience specific messages can engender audience support in hot-button issues such as environmental conservation and climate change.