Building Human Capacity and Capability Through Citizen Science - Experience of Youth

Abstract:

Capacity building in the context of Earth Observations (EO) can take many shapes. One, with a potential long lead time, is the development of human capacity by enabling youth to participate in science through citizen science.

In November 2019 Canberra (Australia) hosted GEO (Group on Earth Observation) Week, an international gathering of EO expertise. As part of the youth engagement program leading up to GEO Week Geoscience Australia supported a Scouts Australia team-based citizen science competition run over 4 months using the GLOBE Observer mobile App to make ground cover observations. This youth-focused competition resulted in not only gathering valuable data intended to help ground truth satellite based products but also interested participants in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers. The winning team of three, ages 10, 11 (team captain) and 15 years, made 111 observations across 5 Australian States covering a distance in excess of 4600km (2858 miles) during the competition. Adults that supported the youth, for both the winning team and others, noted that this less formal exposure to EO and science in general heightened the youth members’ interest in STEM.

As noted in “Learning and developing science capital through citizen science” (Edwards etal 2018. Included in Hecker, S., Haklay, M., Bowser, A., Makuch, Z., Vogel, J. & Bonn, A. 2018. Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy. UCL Press, London. ttps://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352339) the inclusion of citizen science, even in an informal setting, has proved to both focus participants on STEM but also increase the overall community scientific capital.

This presentation will use the Australian competition as a case study to illustrate how citizen science deeply engages and inspires volunteers of all ages, especially youth, to build greater capacity for environmental science within the community as a whole.