**3. Degree of participation**

170 Environmental Monitoring

resulted in expenses for them. For example, Mori et al. (2005) describes a program of identifying and mitigating landslides in the Republic of Armenia in which it was hoped that the citizens of rural areas could help identify landslide-prone areas too small to be delineated by remote imagery. A key in making the program successful was investing time with people in towns prone to landslides, showing them how recognizing landslide hazards and implementing mitigating measures could help them avoid breakage of waterlines, damage to foundations of homes, and loss of cropland which the people had incurred great cost in time and money in developing. Simply talking about economic impacts of landslides at a national level was of no interest to people at a local level, and even created suspicion that the project was being undertaken to prevent people from freely using their land. The program in Armenia is just one example of how monitoring programs which effectively incorporate significant roles for the public can have a profound effect on the willingness of stakeholders to accept monitoring results, can result in better communication efforts, improve program transparency, and can actually result in a reduction in program costs in some scenarios. However, for these results to come about, the design of the monitoring program must carefully examine how the public perceives the subject, and how they will participate or

This chapter will discuss the benefits, as well as potential pitfalls, of significant levels of public involvement in environmental monitoring programs. It will highlight mechanisms for designing, implementing, and maintaining viable monitoring programs with significant public components, and provide several real-world examples of programs that are highly inclusive of public stakeholders. Examples will be provided of environmental monitoring that concerns public and ecologic health, emergency response, as well as improved understanding of environmental processes or phenomena. The chapter will also highlight technological advances that have made public participation and transparency much easier

There is a long history of public participation in environmental monitoring and other scientific endeavours. These "citizen scientists" (e.g., Bonney & LaBranche, 2004) have contributed greatly to several scientific bodies of knowledge by providing large, mainly volunteer constituencies, often comprised mostly of individuals without any formal science education or training, who nevertheless are able to carry out various forms of data collection and reporting that might otherwise be difficult or impossible for reasons of funding, time, or geographic distribution, among others. One of the best examples of a longterm monitoring program with significant public involvement is the National Audubon Society's annual Christmas Bird Count, which has been ongoing for 111 years (http://birds.audubon.org/christmas-bird-count, accessed July 2011). From humble beginnings in the year 1900, when twenty-seven individuals took part in the first bird count, the project now includes tens of thousands of participants in more than 15 countries who monitor bird populations and distributions between December 14th and January 5th annually, and enter their results in an online database. Other ornithological research projects have adopted the citizen science model for more regional scale studies (e.g., McCaffrey, 2005). Another area of science that has long embraced citizen scientists is the astronomy community. The 20-millionth observation of a variable star was made by an amateur astronomer in February 2011 as part of a citizen science program that is in its 100th year

contribute to the program.

to accomplish than in the past.

**2. The citizen as scientist** 

The degree to which the public may participate most successfully in a project will likely be determined by such factors as public visibility of the project, funding, study length, geographical extent, and especially the willingness of those responsible for the operation of a given project to include and define roles for the public that will be of mutual interest and benefit to everyone involved. For purposes of discussion, we separate public participation into two categories: passive and active. Several brief examples of passive participatory programs are given, with discussion focusing on active public participation.

#### **3.1 Passive participation projects**

The arrival over the last decade or so of new information technologies is one of the most significant factors driving greater opportunities for public involvement in scientific monitoring and research endeavours (Kim, 2011; Silvertown, 2009). The realization of personal computers in most homes in developed and developing nations, coupled with the advent of email, the internet, the World Wide Web, and cellular "smart" phones and their associated applications (or "apps") have changed the manner and speed with which data can be gathered, transmitted, accessed, analyzed, and reported. While these innovations have made major contributions to all levels of public involvement, they have leant themselves particularly well to what we refer to as "passive" participation.

Public Involvement as an Element in Designing Environmental Monitoring Programs 173

Active participation refers to those programs that require participants to take an active role in the collection of and/or observation of data, and to record, enter, or otherwise transmit those data. While internet and phone app technologies are usually components of these

Global climate change is already resulting in the changes in the timing of leafing, flowering, and fruiting of plants (plant phenophases) with a general lengthening of the growing season. While there have been many local records developed, there remain significant geographic gaps and gaps in the types of plants for which phenological records have been developed (Backlund et al. 2008). Project BudBurst, co-managed by National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) of the U.S. National Science Foundation (Keller et al. 2008) and the Chicago Botanic Garden (http://neoninc.org/budburst/\_AboutBudBurst.php , accessed July 2011) is designed to address these data needs through public participation. The principle objective of NEON is establishing observational and experimental sites in 20 ecoclimatic domains in the contiguous U.S. as well as the states of Alaska and Hawaii. Project BudBurst's contribution is in expanding the number of locations and species for which information on the response to climate change is collected in the U.S. and Canada by

projects as well, it is often the citizen scientist who must actively enter the data.

using citizen scientists referred to as "Project BudBurst Observers." See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. On-line banner for Project BudBurst, a collaboration between the NEON program funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Chicago Botanic Garden. The project also aims to integrate phenological observation programs initiated by other

Similar to a growing number of programs involving stakeholders in environmental observations, extensive information is available for individuals or groups, including school classes, to participate in the program. A "help site" is also available for assisting in selecting sites, targeting plant species, and interpreting phenological phases. Project BudBurst Observers are encouraged to focus on recording first leaf, full leaf, and first flower, relatively easy phenological observations to make, although data is sought on other events too. For registered users, information is available on the website for interpreting these phases and results can be entered in an on-line journal. Similar to other programs described elsewhere in this chapter, results are available on-line in the form of maps that show the 100 most recent observations for a particular phenomena such as first flower and first pollen in the spring, and 50 percent leaf fall for deciduous plants in the fall. By clicking on the icon for one of the recent observations, information and a photo of the plant of interest and the phenological event observed is provided, and the record number is shown. Particularly for younger participants in the program, these types of on-

**3.2.1 Project BudBurst and related programs in Europe** 

organizations, universities, and national laboratories.

**3.2 Active participation projects** 

By passive participation, we refer essentially to the relatively new phenomenon of allowing one's personal home (or work) computer to be used as a computational resource for studies that require significant computer power which may not be directly available due to funding considerations or due to prior commitments in using resources that are locally available. This essentially free and extensive network of computational power can be an extremely invaluable tool to the researcher who has need of it. This type of participation, while not necessarily providing the participating citizen with physical or intellectual involvement, does give the participant the emotional satisfaction of knowing that he or she is contributing to the understanding or resolution of a problem in which he or she is particularly interested. Aside from installing the software and choosing which projects to support, there is no further participation on the part of the volunteer---all computations run in the background while the user is using the computer for other functions, or when the computer is idle. One benefit to this level of participation is that the home user maintains complete control over which projects to support, the timing of the support, and how much computer processing power to allocate. Several examples are provided below.

#### **3.1.1 SETI@home**

SETI@home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/, accessed July 2011) was the first monitoring project to make use of tens of thousands of personal home computers to process data (Anderson et al., 2002). SETI, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has a scientific goal of detecting intelligent life outside of the Earth. One part of SETI involves using large radio telescopes to monitor for the presence of narrowbandwidth radio signals from outer space which, if detected, would likely be indicative of intelligent origin, since such signals are not known to occur naturally. As of July 2011, SETI@home had more than 1.2 million users, with more than 155,000 actually active when it was accessed, representing 204 countries and over 493 TeraFLOPS average floating point operations per second (http://boincstats.com/stats/project\_graph.php?pr=sah, accessed July 2011).

#### **3.1.2 BOINC**

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/, accessed July 2011) was originally designed to combat the falsification of data by some users of the SETI@home program. BOINC is an open-source software designed for volunteer computing. Since its inception in 2002, it has provided volunteer users worldwide with the opportunity to, among many other things, assist with such endeavours as long-term climate modelling at Oxford University in the UK (http://climateprediction.net, accessed July 2011), help with epidemiological modelling of malaria outbreaks being studied at the Swiss Tropical Institute (http://www.malariacontrol.net/, accessed July 2011), help the Planetary Science Institute monitor and study the hazard posed by near-Earth asteroids (http://orbit.psi.edu/oah/, accessed July 2011), and assist Stanford University in the United States (U.S.) with the monitoring of earthquakes to improve understanding of seismicity in an effort to aid with earthquake preparedness planning (http://qcn.stanford.edu/). The "Quake-Catcher" network, as it is called, is also proactive in involving public schools, providing free educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake preparedness (Cochran et al., 2009).
