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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.

There is consensus among scientists that it is important that students understand the nature of science (NOS) and are competent in using primary literature to support understanding of complicated environmental problems. Because environmental issues involve social and ecological complexities, there is a need to create educational frameworks whereby students learn how to integrate and apply knowledge from both natural and social sciences. To explore the interplay between undergraduate students’ conceptions of NOS for ecology and sociology and how students apply discipline-specific knowledge to a socio-ecological issue, we administered a NOS evaluative survey and analyzed data from student modeling practices within the context of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE). We found that although students held similar conceptions of the NOS for both ecology and sociology disciplines, there were notable differences in how often and how accurately students applied discipline-specific knowledge when modeling a socio-ecological system. Such insight provides guidance for the development of future educational pedagogy that supports students’ ability to integrate knowledge from across natural and social sciences and applies it to real-world environmental issues.

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.

Take Back the Block is a community beautification and citizen science program established for West Baltimore, Maryland (MD) residents. Citizen science, given its focus on data gathering, provides an ideal context to integrate adaptive management while encouraging locally based stewardship through civic ecology practices. The goal of this research is to show how integrating civic ecology practices with adaptive co-management of resources and citizen science can lead to meaningful environmental stewardship. We begin with a structured discussion comparing civic ecology to adaptive management and citizen science. We then share information about our civic ecology-oriented citizen science project that is both consistent with the ten principles of civic ecology practices and strives for adaptive co-management. In many ways, we found that our project aligned well with civic ecology practices with a few changes such as inviting members external to the community to participate and making data collection a component of the stewardship activities. Members of the project were able to achieve some stewardship goals in reclaiming and greening public spaces. In addition, in alignment with adaptive management, they iteratively gathered information that guided projects and serves as evidence and a model of adaptive co-management for communities outside of Baltimore.

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.

Opportunities for people to interact with nature have declined over the past century, as many now live in urban areas and spend much of their time indoors. Conservation attitudes and behaviors largely depend on experiences with nature, and this “extinction of experience” (EOE) is a threat to biodiversity conservation. In this paper, we propose that citizen science, an increasingly popular way to integrate public outreach with data collection, can potentially mitigate EOE. Our review of the literature on volunteers’ motivations and/or outcomes indicates that nature‐based citizen science (NBCS) fosters cognitive and emotional aspects of experiences in nature. Although these experiences can change participants’ behaviors and attitudes toward the natural world, this field remains largely unstudied. As such, even though NBCS can complement efforts to increase opportunities for people to interact with nature, further research on the mechanisms that drive this relationship is needed to strengthen our understanding of various outcomes of citizen science.

In this paper, we share our findings from a 2-year citizen science program called Mosquito Stoppers. This pest-oriented citizen science project is part of a larger coupled natural-human systems project seeking to understand the fundamental drivers of mosquito population density and spatial variability in potential exposure to mosquito-borne pathogens in a matrix of human construction, urban renewal, and individual behaviors. Focusing on residents in West Baltimore, participants were recruited through neighborhood workshops and festivals. Citizen scientists participated in yard surveys of potential mosquito habitat and in evaluating mosquito nuisance. We found that citizen scientists, with minimal education and training, were able to accurately collect data that reflect trends found in a comparable researcher-generated database.

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.

Citizen science has extensively been reported as a useful tool for scientists gathering large quantities of information (Silvertown et al. 2011; Dickinson et al. 2010; Bonney et al. 2009). Citizen Science has been broadly defined in previous literature. We employ the following for purposes of this paper: partnerships between scientists and the public where data are collected, shared, and analyzed (Jordan et al. 2012). These partnerships result in projects that range in participation capacity, participation design, and project goals. On one hand, there are participatory action research projects (Cooper et al. 2007), initially defined by Caren Cooper as projects initiated by non-scientist members of the public and developed hand-in-hand with scientists or scientists hired by the project as consultants (see also Shirk et al. 2012). On the other hand there are crowdsourced or contributory citizen science projects (Bonney et al. 2009), which allow researchers to gather large amounts of data without any input or participation of the public on project development. These large contributory projects such as eBird (www.eBird.org) and Evolution MegaLab have had success in collecting large-scale data sets from participants for long-term trend analysis in the U.S. and Europe respectively. Crowdsourcing citizen science projects such as FoldIt (www.fold.it) and Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org), have capitalized on large numbers of participants to do analysis that computers are not adept at. Co-created action type citizen science projects represent the middle ground, where partnerships between local citizens and scientists have been successful in preservation and restoration efforts of local waterways in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (e.g., ReClam the Bay (www.reclamthebay.org) and Shermans Creek Conservation (www.shermanscreek.org)). Regardless of the project type, all citizen science programs have participants engaged in authentic scientific research and resulted in successful data collection for scientists. While there is no official count of all the citizen science projects active at any given time, anecdotally there are a large number citizen science projects in ecology. Recent findings on patterns and use of citizen science in research found that the bulk of published citizen science based research was ecological/biological in nature (Follett and Strezov 2015). What has been little studied is the role and impact of the professional scientist who is engaging the citizen scientists. Two areas are of particular interest in this research: (1) who and what disciplines use citizen science and (2) the perceived trust and reliability of citizen science gathered data in academia. Research about the ecologists, and scientists writ-large, engaging participants in their research is limited. It is important to know more about the role and use of citizen science in academia because of its increased use in certain fields not just as a research tool but a method of engagement, and engendering broader support for science within the public sphere. If there is indeed a skewed representation of particular disciplines or individuals, there may be implications for broader citizen science outcomes. Additionally, variation in trust and use, or willingness to use, citizen science or citizen science collected data because of academic practice or identity frames may hinder further gains made in the field of citizen science as * Amanda E. Sorensen amasoren@rutgers.edu

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 American public’s environmental, scientific, and civic literacies are generally low. While environmental science courses often recognize the human dimensions of environmental problems and solutions, they typically treat such phenomena as matters of opinion and rarely engage with social scientific ways of knowing. Recently, there has been a push in higher education to advance broader scientific literacy, but little attention has been paid to helping students gain an understanding of how socio-scientific evidence and claims are generated. Our work here aims to develop the knowledge framework that facilitates the integration of knowledge across biophysical and social science domains. In this research brief, we report on a project in which an interdisciplinary team developed a model of climate adaptation and mitigation to help teach undergraduates about the coupled human-climate system. The research team found this process to be integral to both thinking and learning about a system with biophysical and social variables. This project is unique in that we then used this model to develop not just curricula but also a framework that can be used to guide and assess interdisciplinary instruction at the collegiate level. This framework allows learners to make sense of complex socio-environmental issues and reason with scientific information from the social and biophysical sciences.

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.

In west Baltimore, Maryland, USA, disinvestment in housing and infrastructure has left an ecological legacy of mosquito infestation, along with many other social and environmental hazards. Ecological sampling techniques and resident narratives together tell a rich story about how racist housing and planning policies led to landscapes dominated by abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and sanitation problems, which in turn sustain invasive Aedes albopictus mosquitoes that bite and can transmit disease. However, the study’s focus on the seemingly narrow topic of mosquito control presented challenges for resident engagement and participation in a neighborhood troubled by broader issues of environmental and social injustice.

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.

Carotenoids are suspected to be honest indicators of health and adaptation for some cichlid species. In this study, male and female Metriaclima zebra cichlid fishes were fed a specialized diet of carotenoids, and their phenotypic expression and behavioral changes were measured. The effect of carotenoids on female–male mate choice behavioral interactions was also measured. When males were fed either a high- or low-carotenoid diet there was no statistically significant difference in coloration. There was, however, a statistically significant difference in coloration when males were reared in social versus non-social conditions. In Metriaclima zebra cichlids, carotenoids do not appear to be an important factor for mate choice, but other rearing conditions may be.

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.

Citizen science programs pose excellent opportunities for science learning through volunteer engagement in authentic science projects, often with scientists. In this article, we share data on whether the development, discussion, and revision of models resulted in an improved description of scientific practices. We engaged individuals in a collaborative citizen science project where individuals use online resources to pose locally based research questions and use modeling practices to design research. These individuals also gathered data to support or refute their models. Project leaders were interviewed before and after project participation to determine the extent to which ideas about scientific practices have changed. We found that these individuals developed a greater capacity to independently ask and answer questions related to successful research design.

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.