scholarly journals Social and Ecological Elements for a Perspective Approach to Citizen Science on the Beach

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Fanini ◽  
Leonardo Lopes Costa ◽  
Ilana Rosental Zalmon ◽  
Maraja Riechers

Sandy beaches are ecotonal environments connecting land and sea, hosting exclusive resident organisms and key life stages of (often charismatic) fauna. Humans also visit sandy beaches where tourism, in particular, moves billions of people every year. However, instead of representing a connection to nature, the attitude toward visiting the beach is biased concerning its recreational use. Such “sun, sea, and sand” target and its display seem to be deeply rooted in social systems. How could scientists engage the newest generations and facilitate an exit from this loop, fostering care (including participative beach science), and ultimately sustainable sandy beach use? To tackle this question, we applied the concept of social–ecological systems to the Littoral Active Zone (LAZ). The LAZ is a unit sustaining beach functionalities, though it includes relevant features making a beach attractive to the public. Out of the analysis of the system LAZ in its social and ecological templates, we extracted elements suitable to the planning of citizen science programs. The perspective of leverage points was integrated to the needs identified in the analysis, through reconnecting–restructuring–rethinking the components of the system. Two cross-cutting approaches were marked as important to social and ecological designs and break through the dominant perception of beaches as mere piles of sand: the physical dimension (LAZ) of the beach as a unit, and the use of communication through social media, suitable to both monitoring and scientific data collection, and to data communication and hedonistic display of a day on the beach.

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Heinisch

Citizen science has become a world-wide phenomenon. Especially for citizen science projects that have a global reach, translation is crucial to overcome language and cultural barriers to reach members of the public. Translation, understood as the transfer of meaning (of a text) from one language into another language, is crucial for the transmission of information, knowledge and (social) innovations. Therefore, this paper examines the role of translation and terminology used in citizen science projects and how translation can foster (or impede) social innovation through citizen science activities. Based on a set of predefined criteria derived from the social innovation literature, this paper analyzes the factors that contribute to (social) innovation in citizen science by means of translation. A specific focus of the case study is on the aspects of agency, institutions, and social systems. The results demonstrate that translation in citizen science may support a change of social practices as ingredients of social innovations. Additional research is needed to further understand the implications of translation in citizen science and its effects on social innovation. Nevertheless, this work has been one of the first attempts to examine the relation between translation, citizen science and social innovation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
Carla Ricaurte-Quijano ◽  
David Nacipucha ◽  
Julio Gavilanes ◽  
Fanny Manner ◽  
Alba Calles ◽  
...  

The understanding of the different conditions that shape the recreational use of sandy beaches is key for their management. This article explores visitors' and residents' recreational use of four sandy beaches in Ecuador in relation to the physical and socioeconomic context in which this use takes place, including beach morphodynamics, level of urban development, as well as the type and quality of tourism services available. Results show that visitors and residents use the beach for the same recreational activities (i.e., walking and swimming) on beaches with different morphologies and socioeconomic conditions. However, respondents also indicated that physical characteristics (e.g., beach size and swell) are important aspects for choosing a beach. Visitors to rural beaches are more likely to consume informal catering services located within the beach area than formal ones located outside. This particular emerging theme should be taken into consideration for further research on management initiatives in the context of developing countries.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bear

AbstractHistorically sharks have been seen either as a source of income through harvesting, or as a nuisance and danger. The economic value of sharks has traditionally been measured as the total value of sharks caught for liver oil, fins, or meat for consumption. Sharks have also been killed to near extinction in cases where they were seen as a threat to fisheries on other species. This is illustrated by the mass extermination of Basking Sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) in British Columbia. They were seen as a nuisance to fishermen as they got entangled in gill nets during the salmon fishing season. However with the development of the SCUBA diving industry, and ecotourism in general, increased awareness of the role sharks play in marine ecosystems has resulted in changes in how they are perceived and utilized. Despite an ongoing harvest of sharks such as the North Pacific Spiny Dogfish (Squalus suckleyi), sharks now generate economic value through SCUBA diving enthusiasts who travel the globe to see, swim with, and photograph them. The use of digital cameras and other digital media has brought sharks into households around the world and increased awareness of the conservation issues facing many species. This renewed appreciation has led to a better understanding of sharks by the public, resulting in advocates calling for better protections and conservation. In particular, a growing part of the SCUBA diving community wants to contribute to conservation and research projects, which has led to participation in citizen science projects. These projects provide scientific data but also gain ground as ecotourism activities, thus adding to both economic value of tourism and conservation efforts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher

Patients, policy makers, and the public have access to many types of health and scientific data relevant to various individual and societal decisions. Yet, these audiences often struggle with the meaning and the potential usefulness of those data, so they may choose not to engage with the data at all. Scientific and health data are generally difficult to interpret, yet presentations often implicitly assume that the recipient has the necessary contextual knowledge to identify the data’s meaning. To address this problem, designers of data communications should go beyond considering audience characteristics (e.g., numeracy) and focus more on increasing information evaluability (a concept from the judgment and decision-making literatures). The challenge is understanding which data characteristics guide people’s ability to extract meaning from data in a given situation. Prioritizing use-relevant contextual information (e.g., by defining action thresholds, comparison standards, meaningful categories, and/or significant differences) is the single best thing experts can do to improve data communication effectiveness. Doing so increases the chances that the patient, public, or policy maker audience does not just know what their numbers are but also what they mean.


Insects ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 683
Author(s):  
Marc Herremans ◽  
Karin Gielen ◽  
Jos Van Kerckhoven ◽  
Pieter Vanormelingen ◽  
Wim Veraghtert ◽  
...  

The peacock butterfly is abundant and widespread in Europe. It is generally believed to be univoltine (one generation per year): adults born in summer overwinter and reappear again in spring to reproduce. However, recent flight patterns in western Europe mostly show three peaks during the year: a first one in spring (overwintering butterflies), a second one in early summer (offspring of the spring generation), and a third one in autumn. It was thus far unclear whether this autumn flight peak was a second new generation or consisted of butterflies flying again in autumn after a summer rest (aestivation). The life cycle of one of Europe’s most common butterflies is therefore still surprisingly inadequately understood. We used hundreds of thousands of observations and thousands of pictures submitted by naturalists from the public to the online portal observation.orgin Belgium and analyzed relations between flight patterns, condition (wear), reproductive cycles, peak abundances, and phenology to clarify the current life history. We demonstrate that peacocks have shifted towards two new generations per year in recent decades. Mass citizen science data in online portals has become increasingly important in tracking the response of biodiversity to rapid environmental changes such as climate change.


Diversity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Louise I. Lynch-O’Brien ◽  
Wayne A. Babchuk ◽  
Jenny M. Dauer ◽  
Tiffany Heng-Moss ◽  
Doug Golick

Citizen science is known for increasing the geographic, spatial, and temporal scale from which scientists can gather data. It is championed for its potential to provide experiential learning opportunities to the public. Documentation of educational outcomes and benefits for citizen scientists continues to grow. This study proposes an added benefit of these collaborations: the transference of program impacts to individuals outside of the program. The experiences of fifteen citizen scientists in entomology citizen science programs were analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory methodology. We propose the substantive-level theory of transference to describe the social process by which the educational and attitudinal impacts intended by program leaders for the program participants are filtered by citizen scientists and transferred to others. This process involves individual and external phases, each with associated actions. Transference occurred in participants who had maintained a long-term interest in nature, joined a citizen science program, shared science knowledge and experiences, acquired an expert role to others, and influenced change in others. Transference has implications for how citizen scientists are perceived by professional communities, understanding of the broader impacts and contributions of citizen science to wicked problems, program evaluation, and the design of these programs as informal science education opportunities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Drake ◽  
Shelli Dubay ◽  
Maximilian L Allen

Abstract Coyotes are ubiquitous in habitats across North America, including in urban areas. Reviews of human–coyote encounters are limited in scope and analysis and predominantly document encounters that tend to be negative, such as human–wildlife conflict, rather than benign experiences. The objective of our study was to use citizen science reports of human–coyote interactions entered into iNaturalist to better understand the range of first person accounts of human–coyote encounters in Madison, WI. We report 398 citizen science accounts of human–coyote encounters in the Madison area between October 2015 and March 2018. Most human–coyote encounters occurred during coyote breeding season and half of all encounters occurred in moderate development land cover. Estimated level of coyote aggressiveness varied significantly, with 90% of citizen scientists scoring estimated coyote aggression as a 0 and 7% scoring estimated aggression as a 1 on a 0–5 scale (with 0 being calm and 5 being aggressive). Our best performing model explaining the estimated distance between the human observer and a coyote (our proxy for a human–coyote encounter) included the variables distance to nearest paved road, biological season of the year relative to coyote life history, and time of day/night. We demonstrate that human–coyote interactions are regularly more benign than negative, with almost all first-hand reported human–coyote encounters being benign. We encourage public outreach focusing on practices that can foster benign encounters when educating the public to facilitate human–coyote coexistence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 176-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Groulx ◽  
LeeAnn Fishback ◽  
Amanda Winegardner

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 522
Author(s):  
Anna Beniermann ◽  
Laurens Mecklenburg ◽  
Annette Upmeier zu Belzen

The ability to make evidence-based decisions, and hence to reason on questions concerning scientific and societal aspects, is a crucial goal in science education and science communication. However, science denial poses a constant challenge for society and education. Controversial science issues (CSI) encompass scientific knowledge rejected by the public as well as socioscientific issues, i.e., societal issues grounded in science that are frequently applied to science education. Generating evidence-based justifications for claims is central in scientific and informal reasoning. This study aims to describe attitudes and their justifications within the argumentations of a random online sample (N = 398) when reasoning informally on selected CSI. Following a deductive-inductive approach and qualitative content analysis of written open-ended answers, we identified five types of justifications based on a fine-grained category system. The results suggest a topic-specificity of justifications referring to specific scientific data, while justifications appealing to authorities tend to be common across topics. Subjective, and therefore normative, justifications were slightly related to conspiracy ideation and a general rejection of the scientific consensus. The category system could be applied to other CSI topics to help clarify the relation between scientific and informal reasoning in science education and communication.


Author(s):  
Johan Muliadi Kerta ◽  
David Wennoris ◽  
Tonny Gunawan ◽  
Erny Erny

Along with the development of the company to run operations such as data communication and perform other transactions to relations and vice versa, PT Finroll just uses the public network such as sending email to their partners. Data information is not safe in public because it can be tapped or intercepted by unauthorized person. With the Virtual Private Network (VPN), PT Finroll can do business in secure environment to their partners. The methodologies used in this research are data collection that was started by surveying, interviewing, and analyzing the current network topology, performance and design requirements that support network design. From these results, PT Finroll can increase productivity and performance from competition in their business. In addition, with this research company has a better ability to increase their competitiveness in present and the future. 


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document