Broadening participation in citizen science through interactive data exploration

Background/Question/Methods

An interdisciplinary approach is needed to deal with complex ecological issues such as climate changes and mass extinction. This past winter as part of the Open Life Science mentorship program, a software developer collaborated with local government officials, citizen science project organizers, researchers, and educators to create online data exploration tools (DataExplorers.info) that combines iNaturalist data and environment data. iNaturalist is a citizen science project that asks participants to photograph and document the nature around them. By creating a site that gives citizen scientists the chance to explore the data that they help collect, we hope citizen scientists will be encouraged to form their own questions, gain a better understanding of the nature of science, and thereby create a more engaging experience for both participants and organizers. This presentations will cover the opportunities and challenges the interdisciplinary team encountered.

Results/Conclusions

It was the combination of the different view points and backgrounds, and a willingness to do things differently that made this project this possible. As a software developer, I didn’t know what type of science questions could be asked from iNaturalist data. For many of the iNaturalist project organizers, they had no experience working on an interactive website. I applied ideas from private sector software consultancy world to this project: interviewing users to identify problems, quick iterations, constantly getting feedback, consulting domain experts.