Citizens who advance science
SCIENCE is often considered the preserve of specialists, academics and researchers. Yet with modern technology, for example, the digital camera, it is possible to involve people in the collection of valuable scientific data.
Why would scientists be at all interested in getting people involved? One answer is that there are not sufficient resources (human and financial) to collect enough data to answer all the questions that scientists pose. Another is that the involvement of enthusiastic volunteers can expand the types of data captured and create great efficiencies because people are essentially donating their observational skills to scientific projects which are often cash-strapped.
It is also desirable to include as many people as possible in processes of knowledge production. When citizens are involved in knowledge making, they feel part of a collective enterprise and adventure, not distanced from the ivory towers where there is only space for a few well-qualified people to work fulltime on research.
Citizen science is the name given to an approach to research which has benefits for both researcher and citizen. One of the values is to provide an understanding of the basic paradigms of scientific method to large numbers of people. In a nutshell, this involves doing what all scientists do: collecting data in a disciplined way in accordance with a well-thought through protocol.
The Animal Demography Unit (ADU) at UCThas been developing citizen science for more than 20 years and the benefits of the approach are obvious. Between 1987 and 1991, the first bird atlas project collected 7million records of bird distribution in southern Africa. Starting in 2007, the second bird atlas project has collected more than 4 million records. Citizen science enables the collection of data on an unprecedented scale.
One example of a citizen science project undertaken by the ADU was Photos of Weaver Nests. The work began in 2010 and was funded by the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity last week. In this project Dr Dieter Oschadleus and Professor Les Underhill took public awareness and participation to new levels. There are 117 species of weavers, and 112 occur only in Africa and the Indian Ocean islands.
The weavers are the most diverse family of birds: they have a variety of breeding systems, from monogamous to polygamous; their nests are among the most complex structures built by any animal; most weavers feed on seeds, some mainly on insects; some are extremely rare, but the Red-billed Quelea is the world’s most abundant bird species, characterised by the phrase “Africa’s feathered locust”.
Underhill commented that if weavers occurred in Europe, they would have had at least one PhD to a species, due to the fascinating life histories of this avian family. Many weavers are common and yet not well studied due to a lack of resources and the fairly low number of African PhD students. So citizen scientists can take the gap and provide large amounts of data of the common weavers and this data can be used in a variety of ways. Some weavers present a challenge to food security, so working on these species eventually provides economic kickbacks in the agricultural sector. Some weavers pose a threat to energy security as their nests on transmission lines cause power outages. Range changes in weavers can provide clues to the effects of climate change on birds.
Earlier this year the “butterfly atlas” (authored by Silvia Mecenero, Jonathan Ball, David Edge, Michelle Hamer, Graham Henning, Martin Krüger, Ernest Pringle, Reinier Terblanche and Mark Williams) was launched. It is Africa’s first butterfly atlas and took seven years to produce. The atlas offers a complete, integrated database of butterfly distribution records in southern Africa, including Swaziland and Lesotho, one of the continent’s most biodiverse butterfly regions. The project assembled more than 300 000 records of butterfly distribution, historical and modern, and used these to produce as up-to-date maps of butterfly distribution as feasible.
The contribution of citizen scientists was to provide photographic records of butterflies through the online Butterfly Virtual Museum (www.vmus.adu.org.za). These records are critical to developing 21st century distribution maps that ultimately must supersede the records, dating back to the early years of the 20th century, provided by the historical specimen data.
One of the by-products of the butterfly atlas was a rejuvenation of LepSoc, the Lepidopterists’ Association of Africa (www.lepsoc.org.za), and there is a commitment by the citizen scientists there to continue mapping the distributions of butterflies and moths.
The atlas operates to raise awareness about the role of butterflies as pollinators in the ecosystem and as an early warning system for threats to the system posed by climate change. This project provides a model of the three-way partnerships which characterise our modus operandi: government, civil society, academics.
Each species has been assessed to a conservation status according to the standards of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a body that assesses how likely a species is to go extinct by assigning set cat- egories and criteria to each species. Last year, the MammalMAP (the Mammal Atlas of Africa) project was launched. This involved using camera traps on a wide scale to take photographs of nocturnal and rarer mammals. Part of the funding for this project came from the Oppenheimer Memorial Fellowship awarded to the Animal Demography Unit’s director, Underhill. MammalMAP is unashamedly ambitious in its scope.
It may seem hard to believe, but one of the main hindrances to effective mammal conservation in Africa is a lack of good 21st century distribution maps for even quite common mammal species. We do not know their ranges and how these are changing in the face of transformation of landscapes, changes in land use, and changes in climate. The databases of the Animal Demography Unit contain about 15 million records of biodiversity distribution. A fraction of this data is analysed “in house” by our postgraduate students. But the data is made available to researchers worldwide to undertake a host of research projects, and we welcome interactions of this nature.
Many postgraduate research degrees use the data collected by citizen scientists as a central pillar. Dr Sally Hofmeyr undertook an analysis of two decades of data collected through the Co-ordinated Avifaunal Roadcounts project, which monitors large terrestrial birds in mostly agricultural landscapes. This pro
ject’s main tenet is that biodiversity conservation cannot be confined to pro
tected areas, and that all custodians of land play a critical role.
One of the outputs of Hofmeyr’s thesis is a plot providing an index of the abundance of South Africa’s national bird, the Blue Crane, which has the core of its range in the Overberg and Swartland.
Doug Harebottle used data collected by citizen scientists in a project called the Coordinated Waterbird Counts. One waterbird conservation issue which he examined was the decision about when to breach the mouths of estuaries to allow floods out. This cannot be allowed to happen naturally because low-lying properties get flooded. Harebottle undertook a long-term analysis of the Bot River through three breachings. Using additional data collected by CapeNature staff he showed what happens to waterbirds as the system cycles through the tidal phase, with salt water, immediately after a breaching, the transition phase, and the freshwater lake phase.
Data from the bird atlas project was a key input to an analysis that guided SANParks to choosing which were the priority bird species to monitor in each of the national parks. Esther Mostert’s transdisciplinary study introduced to biology decision analysis approaches developed by statisticians. These new methods mimic how the human brain takes decisions, in situations where competing criteria have to be balanced against each other. One of the four criteria was the fraction of the core range of each species that was within a national park. The larger this fraction, the greater the responsibility of the national park for its conservation.
A second criterion was overall range size. Species that are confined to smaller areas need to be watched more carefully than species with large ranges, because they are known to be more susceptible to climate change. Further criteria were based on threat status and taxonomic uniqueness. But two were based on the data collected by citizen scientists.