S9E3 Community and Citizen Science: Mainers Leading the Way

In this episode, we interview Linda Silka, Sarah Kirn, and Jane Disney on citizen and community science in Maine. 

Dr. Linda Silka is a social and community psychologist by training, with much of her work focusing on building community-university research partnerships. She has several decades of experience in leading community-university research partnerships on environmental, economic development, and environmental health issues. 

Sarah Kirn is the Participatory Science Strategist at NASA at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Kirn leads the planning and production of a professional development series for people leading participatory research efforts, with particular focus on meeting the needs of scientists funded by NASA to conduct research using citizen science methods. 

Jane Disney is currently an Associate Professor of Environmental Health at MDI Biological Laboratory. She is also the Director of the Community Environmental Health Laboratory. She is a co-developer of the citizen science online data portal, Anecdata.org. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah Kirn: There was a comment from someone and I said to her, I was like, do you know that’s a scientist? And she looked at me and I could just see her kind of shifting or growing self-identity, like flash across her face as she realized that. This thing that she did in a class and like homework had been valuable enough to a scientist that he wrote back and said, this is really helpful.

[00:00:26] Eric Miller: Hello and welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the official podcast of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where we discussed the policy matters that are most important to Maine’s people and why Maine policy matters at the local, state, and national levels. My name is Eric Miller and I’ll be your host

[00:00:43] Today we’ll be interviewing Linda Silka, Sarah Kirn and Jane Disney on Citizen and Community Science in Maine. Dr. Linda Silka is a social and community psychologist by training with much of her work, focusing on building community university research partnerships. She has several decades of experience in leading these research partnerships on environmental, economic development and environmental health issues.

[00:01:07] Dr. Silka was the former director of this very University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, and is now a senior fellow at the University of Maine’s, George Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. Prior to moving to the University of Maine, Dr. Silka was a faculty member for three decades at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where she directed the Center for Family Work Community, served as the special assistant to the Provost for community outreach and partnerships, and was Professor of Regional Economic and Social Development.

[00:01:40] Recent research partnerships she has facilitated include the NIEHS-funded Southeast Asian Environmental Justice Partnership and the New Ventures Partnership, the HUD-funded Community Outreach Partnership Center and Diverse Healthy Homes Initiative, and the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment.

[00:02:03] Sarah Kirn is the participatory science strategist for NASA based in the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Kirn leads the planning and production of a professional development series for people leading participatory research efforts with particular focus on meeting the needs of scientists funded by NASA to conduct research using citizen science methods.

[00:02:25] She works with NASA’s citizen science officer, Dr. Marc Kuchner on strategic tasks to advance and grow the visibility and success of NASA-funded citizen science projects. Prior to her current role with NASA, Kirn led several participatory science efforts at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Most recently as the program manager of the Public Participation in Science Initiative, she oversaw the development of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Ecosystem Investigation Network, and co-created some of the first projects on the new platform, including investigations of diadromous fish statewide, and the impacts of sea level rise in the city of Belfast.

[00:03:08] From 2002 to 2010, she oversaw the development of the Vital Science program from its start as a Palm-based pilot in six Maine schools to its implementation as a cross border education program in Ireland and Northern Ireland, to the web-based platform that eventually serves thousands of students, hundreds of educators, and dozens of scientists.

[00:03:30] Jane Disney is currently an Associate Professor of Environmental Health at MDI Biological Laboratory. She’s also the director of the Community Environmental Health Laboratory. She is a co-developer of the Citizen Science Online Data Portal Anecdata.org. Since 2000, she has worked with multiple community partners, identifying and helping to remedy threats to public health and the clean waters on and around Mount Desert Island Community.

[00:03:56] Environmental health laboratory projects include participation in state level initiatives such as the Maine healthy coastal beaches and Maine volunteer phytoplankton monitoring programs, and an NIGMS Science Education Partnership award project that involves partnering scientists with teachers and students in collecting well water samples for arsenic analysis.

[00:04:20] They are also working with Maine Laboratories to understand the movement of PFAS through watersheds and the potential for contamination of private wells. The community at Environmental Health Laboratory has engaged thousands of citizen scientists, including teachers, students, and community members in these and other projects over the last two decades.

[00:04:42] Citizen science, often referred to as community science or participatory science, is a powerful collaboration that pairs professional researchers with everyday people to monitor, collect, and analyze scientific data. As highlighted by the Maine climate action plan, this collaboration is used to track critical environmental metrics like water quality, storm impacts, tides temperatures, and local ecosystem health as well as much more. Citizen Science is a volunteer force that offers community members hands-on STEM education, allowing participants to learn the scientific methods and ecological principles behind their actions. This process lets scientists gain access to vast amounts of data across wide geographical areas and long time scales, and volunteers deepen their scientific literacy as well as their connection to their environment.

[00:05:31] The combined participation of scientists makes a significant difference. For example, in coastal regions where environmental damage is rapid in many Maine coastal towns, observations submitted by citizen scientists can help formalize valuable local knowledge. Residents who intuitively know where their water pools or where high tides are worst are trained to make observations during flood events, which helps researchers and city planners to pinpoint high-risk flooding regions with greater accuracy. Another example, in Southern Maine, the Volunteer Beach Profile Monitoring Program allows local volunteers to make measurements of the beach, tracking changes in sand distribution over time, and thereby contributing valuable data to identify areas of beach erosion and accreditation.

[00:06:18] As volunteers can do this work up to every month, the compounded knowledge is vital to more accurate and thorough data over the long term. These are two examples among many. Citizen Science is a true volunteer force, giving community members not just a chance to help make a positive impact in their local areas, but to learn the science behind what they’re doing as well.

[00:06:40] And now onto our panel.

[00:06:42] Hi all. Thanks so much for joining us today. What citizen science directives have you led and are continuing to work on? Linda, if you wouldn’t mind starting us off.

[00:06:52] Linda Silka: Sure. So I’m gonna give an example that is from when I was in Massachusetts, but it, I think, relates to all of this. So the it was one of the first, citizen science things that a lot of people were involved in, and it was working with refugee and immigrant groups. So Lowell had the largest Cambodian community in the US. They came to Lowell. People were pretty excited coming to Lowell and didn’t realize that it was a contaminated city. It was one of the earliest areas to have a lot of things going on. A lot of things being built in the city and stuff being poured out into the river and lakes.

[00:07:36] So that was really a start. We and I’ve continued to do things with various kinds of groups, but that was really very important. And I’m gonna kind of go back to it back and forth to it because it relates in a lot of way to, whether we’re talking about Lewiston, Maine, or whether we’re talking about a whole lot of other places that when you’re talking about citizen science and people aren’t citizens, you have to change the language because the language is really pushes back people who have so much to offer.

[00:08:11] Eric Miller: That’s so interesting. I’m excited to dig into that some more. Jane, how about you? What directives have you led or continuing to work on?

[00:08:18] Jane Disney: The earliest time when I was really engaging people as citizen scientists was when I was teaching high school biology in the nineties, and I had kids collecting water quality data for the Department of Marine Resources.

[00:08:34] In particular, there were bacterial issues that they wanted us to ferret out and so we were collecting data that they could use. And then as time went by, actually the kids won a citizen science award from SeaWorld Bush Gardens, which came with some cash and allowed us to launch a nonprofit in our classrooms.

[00:08:54] So our idea was to really expand this capacity to collect water quality and other related environmental data. And over time people brought to us their research interests, like what they were curious about in the environment, and one of those things was the decline in eelgrass populations around the state of Maine.

[00:09:16] So I would say the second big initiative was the decade that we spent engaging all kinds of people after school groups, summer camp groups, schools, but also community members and people from the aquaculture community and fishing community in restoring eelgrass. And that’s something to talk more about.

[00:09:40] I swore I would never get into groundwater. So many people would ask me about their drinking water and I would say I do surface water. I do, subtidal or intertidal, but over time I realized that the structure of our lab, we call ourselves the Community Environmental Health Lab really positioned us to be able to help people address those kinds of questions.

[00:10:05] So I think the third big initiative was this engaging teachers and kids across all of Maine and New Hampshire and collecting drinking water samples for arsenic and other toxic metals. And we’ve now have collected over 4,800 water samples with 14 metals. It’s a huge data set that’s telling us a lot about people’s exposures, exposure risks and and other things.

[00:10:29] So of course, working in well water, again, community came to us and said but what about PFAS? And although that- I don’t, I wouldn’t consider what I’m doing now with PFAS to be a citizen science project. It’s very community driven and so it really has more of a community-engaged research feel to it as we work with the community to identify their concerns and the things they wanna take a look at. And then we seek funding with them to try to accomplish those goals. So citizen science, community, engaged research, it’s all part of the same continuum I feel.

[00:11:08] Eric Miller: And a water quality project is one after my own heart, as I, I used to do water quality sampling myself, and I resonate with that experience of, I had a, I wanted a work truck and a boat, and I achieved that.

[00:11:20] And I quickly realized that it was, the water quality conversation was so much more than the ecological data points that I was gathering. It was the human element that was very vital too. Sarah, how about you?

[00:11:32] Sarah Kirn: Yeah, wonderful to be here with all of you. So thank you for hosting this conversation and bringing participatory science, citizen science, community science forward.

[00:11:40] I think it’s so important today. My path with this work began in about 2002, and I took over the vital science program at the Gulf of Maine, which is now the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. And over a few years, this became one of the kind of early project like Jane’s that was working explicitly with middle school students, middle school teachers and scientists to really create a valuable educational experience that was also a valuable source of data that scientists really needed.

[00:12:12] So we were monitoring for where are invasive species in the state and where are they not? And engaging kids in communities all across the state in making kind of evidence-based claims about what they were seeing and sharing those with scientists on a website pre-Google Maps. So we were very cutting edge at the time.

[00:12:31] And then I was also involved in kind of recreating that platform when ours kind of Drupal coding was no longer supported kind of reinventing the program and reinventing the platform into what is now the Ecosystem Investigation Network, which is still running strong at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

[00:12:49] And I also kind graduated at that point and started working with communities and what I would call a community science project with the city of Belfast, creating a project with residents in that community who were interested in collecting data and engaging people in sea level rise and the impacts on that coastal community.

[00:13:07] And then, I don’t know if you could say graduated, but now for the last five years or so, I have been consulting with scientists who’ve been funded by NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Association. Consulting with NASA-funded scientists who’ve received grants to create and manage participatory science projects in pursuit of research questions and priorities across NASA’s five science divisions in the science mission directorate, which has been really fun.

[00:13:39] Linda Silka: Can I?

[00:13:40] Eric Miller: Yeah, Linda, go ahead.

[00:13:41] Linda Silka: Yeah, just add these are, these are just really so interesting when we started our work with a Cambodian community before that began, we heard from so many people in the town of Lowell who like help people and various people. They said, and they really did say this, they said, you just tell those people not to fish in that river.

[00:14:04] You just tell people not to eat anything out of the river. That doesn’t work. That does not work. And that was what, and it was just really interesting that they assumed that you should do that. So one of the early things when we got funding from EPA to all work together on some of these things is to ask people, and this’ll sound a little, maybe a little strengthened.

[00:14:26] It really did work. We asked people about their favorite recipes using fish from their culture. People gave us these great things. We put ’em in a set of materials that then went out, pictures and stuff to the community to say, see how we all care about fish? Fish are really important here, and used that then to start to think about what did we need to do in terms of the river and its impacts and things, and we’d see people walking around in town carrying those recipes, which was really very nice.

[00:15:03] Eric Miller: It really goes to show that while, on the surface, some cultural differences may be a barrier in some senses, but the way that the similarity of engaging with a resource often transcends those differences and can connect.

[00:15:17] Which is really interesting. The citizen to community discussion is already coming up. Jane, you had mentioned, and I would love to start with you to see what the shift from citizen science to community science is and why that’s important.

[00:15:32] Jane Disney: I would say that in traditional citizen science type projects, the researchers are really leading the way.

[00:15:41] They have a question and they need data. They find a community that may have enough motivation or interest in helping to collect that data. And it allows you often to crowdsource more data than you would be able to do with a team of graduate students and postdocs. ‘Cause there’s just so many people.

[00:16:05] That’s great. A lot of people don’t necessarily know what other research they’d like to pursue, but they are interested in contributing to what local researchers are asking questions about. But then there does come a time in communities when they have a concern and they don’t know where to take it.

[00:16:24] And they hope that there might be some help from people who have had some experience here that can help maybe guide some process with them, but they definitely aren’t, set up to do it completely on their own. And this is where creating really nice partnerships with scientists, community organizations, property owners, municipal leaders where, we can sit down together and say, yeah, this is looking like it’s bigger than all of us. It’s like the researchers can’t solve it alone. The people need some conduit for achieving their goals. You sit down together and you carve out a way forward to get the data and information that you need to inform everyone about either the status of things like how is the water or how is everybody doing health wise, for example, and then what resources.

[00:17:19] I can give you some more specific examples later of like how this is playing out in communities that we’re working with that are PFAS-impacted right now? Yeah, those are kind of the two big differences, and we can go from there.

[00:17:32] Eric Miller: The way that the puzzle pieces kind of come together of the community in need and the researchers that could use some expanded capacity as well.

[00:17:39] Yeah, Linda.

[00:17:40] Linda Silka: So one of the interesting things, as I’ve worked across a number of different places in terms of citizen science and as I’ve been at conferences, the problem with citizen science is in a sense twofold. One is that it’s citizen, not citizens, but citizen. And so it sometimes people. Think, oh it’s one person.

[00:18:01] All we need to do is involve one person, like from the community. And it doesn’t, in a lot of people’s view, it doesn’t include immigrants. That immigrants who are a really a big part where so many of us are from immigrant communities. It’s not inclusive in people’s minds.

[00:18:17] Eric Miller: Absolutely. Sarah.

[00:18:20] Sarah Kirn: First, I’d like to note that I really think this isn’t a shift from citizen to community, but rather growth in this whole enterprise of participatory science, which is to some degree emerging as a better umbrella term.

[00:18:35] Community science, I think, is very specifically what Jane is describing. There’s a group of people who aren’t necessarily scientists who have a concern or they have a priority, they have something that they wanna pursue when science is the right discipline to use to pursue an answer to that question.

[00:18:53] And they have organized to find an answer. Community science, classic examples of this are environmental justice projects. So there’s some issue, it’s inappropriately picking on some group of people and they wanna do something about it. And that’s a very rich area of work. There’s some wonderful practices and wonderful lessons all of us can learn from the environmental justice community that kind of has begun and grown from North Carolina, and I would call community science kind of a part of that.

[00:19:22] Citizen science, I also agree is, has been the word the phrase that has emerged as the scientist driven, like a scientist has a question. A scientist has a need for people to help use their incredible unmatched human senses to work through a database or a data set of something. So citizen science has kind of been in that scientist-driven camp, but there’s all kinds of permutations and not cases that are kind of in between or something else altogether, and no one name is going to adequately describe all of those different participatory practices so that people understand what it is that’s going on. As this kind of movement of participation grows, it very appropriately is outgrowing constraining language, right?

[00:20:12] We need more specific kind of practices in this space to be described with more kind of descriptive, useful language, not just for the people who are leading projects, but for people who’ve never heard of them, but might be interested if only they understood what it was. So it’s all about what phrase you use is all about to whom you’re speaking, who do you hope to engage?

[00:20:33] Absolutely that word citizen can be a real trigger word, especially for communities where citizenship is insecure. In other spaces though, that phrase, citizen science is really the best to use because it connects with the previous decades of research and the academic disciplines, and that’s the phrase you need to search to find and prior knowledge and practices.

[00:20:56] So it’s really about who are you talking about and I think coming up with more descriptive language for the different kinds of practices and all that they’re accomplishing in this great big, broad, diverse space of participatory science.

[00:21:12] Eric Miller: I think what I’m getting from this is a recognition that there’s some scientific questions where the question asking and the findings searching is a two-way street between those pillars of academic institution, as well as the communities that they reside in.

[00:21:30] Linda Silka: If I could just add to those great points is scientists also need kind of retraining in certain ways. And David Hart and I wrote an article that was trying to make that point. And it was, we were hoping, to get scientists reading it, it was rebuilding the ivory tower, a bottoms-up experiment in aligning research with societal needs.

[00:21:54] And so it talks about a lot of those different kinds of themes.

[00:21:59] Sarah Kirn: And if I could add one, a couple of things too. My goal in this work is to get more people and understanding how science works, understanding that it’s kind of a set of methods or a set of tools for discovering answers to questions that we have about the natural world, broadly writ here and across the universe.

[00:22:21] So all forms of participatory science and engagement I think are good, especially when they’re not kind of fabricated, like cute engagement thing that has a right answer, but it’s really engaging people in the mystery and excitement and frustrations and challenges of real science. All the different modes I think are so good, whether they’re projects that are kind of getting kids involved in doing science or if they’re projects that are involved with communities driving their own research questions.

[00:22:52] But so many people, and I think a lot of graduate students in sciences fall into this camp too. It’s really hard to ask your own great researchable science question. That’s actually a really challenging thing to do well, and so many people I have worked with, especially around teachers and students, they want a project that they can trust has been well designed by scientists that they can participate in.

[00:23:21] And so they’re kind of guaranteed that what they’re gonna do is kind of aligned with scientific practices that the observations they’re making or the work they’re doing is actually gonna be useful to someone. They want that assurance, so they’re in this space. There’s a huge, wonderful space for those scientist-designed projects.

[00:23:40] It’s all good. I don’t wanna minimize or kind of prioritize one thing is better than other. It’s just what is the fit for purpose? What’s, what do you need to answer? Who needs the answer? How are you doing?

[00:23:52] Linda Silka: And over again. I hear community people sometimes saying, no more research about us without us. So we’ve got all these different interesting tensions, going on.

[00:24:03] Sarah Kirn: I wouldn’t even say it’s tension though. I think there are research questions about people. A hundred percent people should be involved in some of the research that the scientists I work with are doing. They’re, discovering different kinds of bodies out in the solar, out of our solar system. Across the universe. It’s not something that is, it’s not about any person, but it’s for some people like exploring the universe is like so meaningful and so motivating, but they maybe don’t know. And having a project that they can join that allows them to go explore something that’s of interest to them is hugely appropriate and often very appropriate to be driven by someone with a PhD.

[00:24:48] So it really depends on the kinds of questions that are being asked and pursued.

[00:24:53] Eric Miller: Yeah, and cultivating this sense of energy to participate and learn what’s available to participate in, I think gets to our next question. Where, Sarah, you were discussing some of the work you’d done in schools before, which sounded great by the way.

[00:25:11] What role would you say citizen and community science play in public education? Sarah, if you wouldn’t mind continuing.

[00:25:18] Sarah Kirn: I’d love to, and I’m gonna be annoying and I’m gonna say it depends. Two major things. It probably depends on what kinds of things. One is project design. Has a project been designed to really help people learn something?

[00:25:32] So the project that I mentioned before, Vital Signs, we really, we literally designed it with scientists and teachers sitting around a big conference table talking about what are the lessons that teachers need to teach their students in middle school? What are the skills that they’re trying to grow in their students.

[00:25:47] And then scientists, what do you need, and how do we kind of put these two things together? Not every project is really designed to support learning. Some of them are very much designed for other objectives, and I think that has a big impact on what people get out of the project. And then the materials that a project creates.

[00:26:04] And I think this is an opportunity that is, that all projects in my view ought to take advantage of making really great explanatory materials available at an appropriate, accessible level. So that participants in the project, whatever’s motivating their participation, if they’re in there and they’re gonna getting into it themselves, are you making kind of plain language descriptions available so they really understand not only what are they doing, what’s gonna happen with the observations they’re making or with the classified data that they’re producing, but how does that question fit in the bigger enterprise of that field. So that you’re kind of drawing them into, or letting them follow a path, a well-lit path into a deeper understanding of the kind of theory and method and prior knowledge around that question.

[00:26:57] So I think there’s huge opportunity. It’s great, especially middle school kids. They’re so motivated to be, to do something that matters to their immediate community, that matters to adults. It matters to scientists to not be just doing homework, but been doing something that has real value and that they get recognized for.

[00:27:17] I think that’s just a perfect kind of developmental, connection opportunity. So yeah, it depends. It’s a great opportunity. I love this work. I think there’s opportunity for projects that I’m supporting now that are really for adults too, to do the same kind of thing and get deeper into topics to know something however small that nobody else knows.

[00:27:40] It’s so fun. It’s really motivating and thrilling.

[00:27:44] Eric Miller: Yeah, I can imagine having the experience of getting outside the classroom and learning in a new way and having a tangible result from an answer to a question that was brought and feels like it matters is inspiring.

[00:27:57] Linda Silka: One of the things that I’ve found kind of interesting that kind of links to some of the things we’re saying is I’ve had the good fortune to go to a lot of different places to talk about citizen science  slash community science and to see what the different places are thinking about and stuff.

[00:28:13] So Arizona, they brought me to talk about sort of what some of the things that they were thinking about in terms of Rivers, Colorado. A whole bunch of different things there. Australia, I went to six different universities and looked at what they were doing in terms of citizen science slash community science and what might need to, to occur to be different.

[00:28:34] Some Native American nations and also Canada representing the US in terms of some of the things we’re doing. And each place had some similarity to other places and some things that were really different. So one of the things we need to be thinking about is how do we have something that’s really gonna be attentive to local place, but draw on these new kind of lessons we’re learning about how we all work together.

[00:29:00] And each place just, I left there thinking I wanna stay here.

[00:29:07] Eric Miller: That’s a great point. Jane, do you have anything to add to the public education and the role it plays in citizen and community science?

[00:29:15] Jane Disney: The great thing about schools is that there’s just so many people there, so many hands do make light work and some of the things that communities need to have done, so I’ll use the example of our science education partnership award or cbo project that’s running across Maine and New Hampshire, the kids get some background information from their teacher. We do teacher training around private drinking water and risks of contamination by toxic metals that naturally occur in our bedrock. Then the kids all take a kit home and collect a water sample from their homes.

[00:29:54] Kids though, that wasn’t enough for them, right? They needed to also get their neighbors and also get their extended family. And so some schools were collecting, hundreds of water samples, which was amazing because it gave us a deep look into what was going on in that community. Often the students would collect more water samples in a year than state agencies had been able to get collected in the past decades.

[00:30:20] So we kind of had instant big data set for some communities. That gave us a lot of insight into what was going on and the focus on the project. Early on, we called it All About Arsenic because that is the contaminant that, it was really on people’s minds when we got started, but the students discovered uranium and manganese and lead and all kinds of things.

[00:30:41] And then a key component of that project was linking teachers with nearby scientist partners from colleges and universities that were close to their communities. So they had a sounding board for the data that they were amassing, and somebody that could help them navigate through an analysis of what that data was telling them.

[00:31:02] But then the last key component of the project is getting the word out to somebody. Anybody out there who are you gonna share your information with? So we’ve been training teachers around scientific outreach and how to identify their audience and, yep. Like for an example, students at Westbrook High School here in Maine gave public testimony in Augusta when there was a piece of legislation proposed that would provide funding for water testing for low-income families and landlords.

[00:31:34] They actually, made a big splash in terms of how they were received by the committee that was bringing this piece of legislation forward and that did pass. And the students were given lots of credit by both Maine CDC, by Defend Our Health, which is a local environmental advocacy organization. And by the legislators themselves that the student testimony was really compelling and a reason why they actually decided to ask the legislature for twice the amount of money that was being allocated. They didn’t get that much, but it kinda showed the students that it made a ripple in the universe that they had collected the data, that they had a data supported story that was gonna be compelling at the legislative level.

[00:32:22] All of these things are possible out of these data collections. Yes, it’s been informative to state agencies and to us in terms of our own research around, water quality in the state of Maine. But it’s also been empowering to the students at the local level and has made a difference that’s now still playing out.

[00:32:40] These funds are something that you can apply for through the Maine Housing Authority. And every time I hear of another person who’s, gotten a water treatment system in their home because of this funding, I definitely let teachers know and want them to pass that on. Now it’s another generation of students, but they’re hearing what students before them were able to accomplish and then that they’re building on their data set and building on their successes.

[00:33:07] So there’s just a thousand reasons why this is powerful education and it’s stuff that will stick with kids too. It’s because it’s so highly relevant. It’s not something they’re gonna learn and forget tomorrow because it’s those habits of mind and way of being in the world that they’re learning on top of the content.

[00:33:24] I have teachers who are chemistry teachers. I didn’t know this would happen, but the teachers that have come to the program, they teach chemistry, they teach biology, they teach environmental science, they teach outdoor science. They teach all kinds of things. So the project can nest in all kinds of different curriculum, and still the students can have this experience of collecting real world data and making a difference.

[00:33:48] Eric Miller: So what are some of the ways that you all have found, make the most out of, or tend to resonate and lead to the best energy and engagement with a classroom or students, younger people in general, just engaging to get them excited about a project. Jane, if you wouldn’t mind?

[00:34:09] Jane Disney: I had mentioned earlier, I think that relevance is really important for student engagement and learning, so I wouldn’t have them working on water quality issues like somewhere else. Not to start, at least. I think that students need to feel compelled in their own place and discover things near to home that their families and their communities are benefiting from. And then they can take that lesson wider, maybe in a upper grade or at a later life stage.

[00:34:41] But I do think that the sense of place is really important. That’s what we try to cultivate. And it’s easier now that we have generations of student data because we know more to help kind of get kids inspired and gets that coverage in their community that will make sure everyone’s gonna have a healthy future.

[00:35:03] Eric Miller: I saw Sarah’s hand go first.

[00:35:04] Sarah Kirn: Yeah. I think some of the things that make for really wonderful projects for youth are the same things that are wonderful for everyone, and one, it’s kind of building off what Jane was just talking about keeping it authentic. If you’re exploring a question that’s relevant in your community, that’s one level of authenticity.

[00:35:22] I think if you hear from the scientists who are asking you to do this work and you get feedback on what you’ve done or thanks, I think that can be really transformative for young people. I remember many years ago I was with a middle school student and looking at the data that she had contributed on the Vital Signs website and that there was a comment from someone and I said to her, I was like, do you know that’s a scientist?

[00:35:47] And she looked at me and I could just see her kind of shifting or growing self-identity, like flash across her face as she realized that. This thing that she did in a class and like homework had been valuable enough to a scientist that he wrote back and said, this is really helpful. Or I, it’s been too long to remember exactly what he said, but that authentic interaction with practicing scientists or with other people who really care about the same question, I think can be really transformative.

[00:36:18] I also think that these projects give young people who are figuring out like, who am I? What’s my role in the world? How, where do I wanna play? Where do I wanna exercise my skills and talents? Where do I wanna give it? It gives those young people an experience of how, of their place in science, if you will, or the relevance of science to them.

[00:36:39] So I have two quick examples of this. In the original Vital Science program we had students working in teams and as a tool for teachers. We allowed students to make sketches and then take a photograph and include it in their observation that was uploaded because sometimes, students are done, one team is done much faster, and if you get kids making a picture, drawing the thing that they’re looking at slows everybody down.

[00:37:02] It’s actually a really important science tool to look very closely at the details of whatever it is you’re trying to identify. And one day, this astonishingly beautiful sketch that was not only accurate to the species, but also just had kind of life and movement got posted as part of an observation.

[00:37:18] And I talked with the teacher about that sketch ’cause it was just so extraordinary. And come to find out, it was done by a student who was kind of not engaged in school. The only part of school that he liked was art. And the school board had cut the art program the year before and he kind of lost his identity in school.

[00:37:39] By being invited to contribute a sketch as part of the science class, he saw that his skill and art actually had a place and therefore he had a place in science and it had totally transformed his having that experience and then all the positive attention that he got in comments on our website had really transformed his experience of school and he was now getting A’s and his test scores and like it had really shifted who he thought he was, because he had this experience opportunity to find success in science. There are all kinds of talents that are necessary in science.

[00:38:17] So another more recent example in one of these NASA sponsored projects, some of those projects, they, their focus is on new discovery that they can write it up into the peer review, the literature and citizen scientists, we call ’em Citizen Science because citizen scientists, because of the 2016 Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act that authorized federal agencies to use participatory methods.

[00:38:40] So when this citizen scientist became a published author, I had a chance to help him write a profile to post on the NASA website. And then one of the questions in my little interview: it’s what have you learned from citizen science? Very deliberately open-ended, and this young person, he was young-ish, wrote back a little bit of autism can be a great thing, which I still get chills when I talk about that story and talk about that young person because again, that project that he was engaged in and actually having a little bit of extra sticktoitiveness on the details and doing something repetitive was the thing that had allowed him to stick with it long enough and get really good at this task and be able to find the thing that project was looking for.

[00:39:24] Those opportunities that young people have, they’re doing something different. It’s real. The context is real, and they have success can change the trajectory of their identity and their lives, and I think that thrills me more than almost anything.

[00:39:40] Linda Silka: Yes. Oh, these are just such great examples. Really great examples.

[00:39:44] So one of the things the youth that we were working with in Lowell were thinking about as collected data, about the river and water contamination and stuff, is they said, we can’t tell the adults what should happen that doesn’t k now our culture, we don’t do that. It’s gonna be really important that they understand what we found.

[00:40:04] And so we got funding to create a cable television show, and the youth said we can’t be the people who are talking about what we’ve done, but we can interview the adults. And by the way, we ask the questions, we’ll get more and more people to understand, oh, we have problems in Lowell. Oh we have to deal with them.

[00:40:30] These are important. And this is, it just says just in time, this is, they figured out which adults should be on the cable television show. How to ask them questions about the data and what they thought the community should do, and it really worked. You’d walk around and you’d hear people talking about this cable television series, so they were just thinking so carefully about sort of how to get the word out and recognizing that they’re not the speakers who should speak about it, even though they’re knowledge holders.

[00:41:04] Eric Miller: Wow and so it’s, this is really interesting because we’ve had mention of publishing on cable tv. You had, you’re holding up a VHS tape just now. Sarah, you had mentioned how you all were publishing online, like before Google Maps was a thing. And so technology and online databases has changed. A lot and the ease of submission of information through apps has changed things a lot, and so I’m really curious how these have expanded the capacity of citizen and community science in your fields and how integral they are to your process.

[00:41:35] Sarah, if you’d like to start.

[00:41:38] Sarah Kirn: So there is a relatively new project that I’m really excited about at NASA and it’s actually all about a data repository. So it turns out people who are interested in how, in the space environment as a place for terrestrial life, we’ve been running experiments in doing things, investigations in that for a long time.

[00:41:59] Extremely expensive work. So this is everything from the health of an astronaut who’s spending an extended stay on the International Space Station to fungal experiments being grown in kind of very short, low cost space travel or worms or like all the things that the mice from Jackson Lab that go to space to help us understand different things.

[00:42:21] All of these data from experiments about life in the high radiation, low gravity environment of space. That all those data sets are being pulled into a single database called the Open Science Data repository, and the folks who are pulling all of those data together are doing it in a very open way with a lot of kind of elements of open science, citizen science, participatory science.

[00:42:47] First, they recognized that what they were doing was kind of, nobody had done it before and they really needed to engage a broad community of scientists and how that was happening. So they put out open call to any scientist or anyone who are interested in doing two things with them around this repository.

[00:43:04] One, figuring out the metadata. So the data about the data, how they could organize that. What were the descriptions that were needed to enable what they call re-analysis across these different data sets that were in this single database to big repository. And then also inviting groups of people, scientists, and anyone or high school students involved in actually asking some of those research questions and conducting that re-analysis to find answers. And this group, they’re also actively looking for more data sets about life in space. This group, which includes a lot of scientists. But again, high school students and every, everyone else have been enormously productive. I just think it’s fascinating.

[00:43:53] It’s one of the first research efforts that I know of that’s not pursuing a question, but they’re focused around a data repository.

[00:44:03] Bringing it back to Maine, I promised I would. Maine has an incredibly rich history of people collecting water quality data from water bodies across our watershed. I very affectionately, and with enormous respect, call them all the friends of the Ji wats, right?

[00:44:21] There are groups of people who live around a lake and they’ve been collecting water quality or ice out data on their lake for decades, or they’re looking at a stream or they’re looking at something and all those data sets, they’re beginning to move online, some of them, but they all exist in isolation.

[00:44:39] What would happen if you could put all of those data sets in a single repository, bring in some NASA or other remote sense data, bring in time series. What would we learn about the interconnections among water bodies in our watershed or how pathogens or contaminants, like what Jane studies are moving through the watershed.

[00:45:03] This effort is way out there. I don’t understand all the signs of it. I’m not a data scientist, but I recognize it as like this is a model we are going to see more of and I can’t wait. This is actually part of the original design of the Ecosystem Investigation Network at the Gulf of Maine Research and Zoo, trying to create a shared platform where all these different, but related by location investigations could all be housed so we could start learning more.

[00:45:33] By asking questions across these data sets. So that’s kind of looking forward. The thing that I’m really excited about technology.

[00:45:41] Eric Miller: I love finding a data set that I’m able to apply in my field. It’s so fun to be able to make connections and think about a problem through a new data lens if you will.

[00:45:53] Linda. Yeah.

[00:45:55] Linda Silka: I was just, these are just such great examples and I was gonna mention that one of the things that all of this can do that I think solves a certain problem is what I kept hearing from my granddad growing up in Iowa is how annoyed he was at Cooperative Extension because they would come and tell him he wasn’t planting his corn, right?

[00:46:18] So he wasn’t following the shape, sort of, of the hillsides and stuff. And he kept saying to us, what does that person know? They don’t grow corn. They don’t know. And so there’s just this interesting challenge we face over and over again where somebody who’s spent their life doing the work that they do.

[00:46:37] And there may be problems that they may need to change things, but the way the information is gathered and the way the information is shared just shuts things down so you don’t get the change that you want.

[00:46:51] Jane Disney: So I should jump in before we’re over and say that in the meantime, Sarah, we felt that there was a need to pull data sets together and we had many of our own that were emerging that we felt had relevance.

[00:47:06] The today time. So we launched a website in 2013 called Anecdata, and the very first project on it was called Eelgrass in Maine. And we just asked people where they were seeing eelgrass and where they had been seeing it, but now it was gone and it was enabled us to understand that upper bays were losing eelgrass, but not outer parts of the coastline.

[00:47:31] And trying to then track down what that meant. But over time we put our water quality data, our PFAS data, you can get all the wells we’ve tested on there. There’s 4,800 entries by kids and teachers in our all about arsenic project on anec data. We went to citizen science conferences and said, who else wants to use Anecdata?

[00:47:51] And all I can tell you is we have hundreds and hundreds of projects and multiple languages from all over the world. And yet still, it’s not a comprehensive data set. It tends to be coastal. CitSci.org, for example, out of Colorado, tends to have more mountain projects. So we have some data portals out there that are, tend to collect certain kinds of information.

[00:48:12] I just wanna throw in though that NASA has four projects on Anecdata.org, and I was just taking a look at some of them. One called Night Sky Pollution that has 1,972 observations. For example, Smartphone Astrophotography is a project they have on there, Satellite Streak Watcher, and a Silent Earth project that was launched during COVID-19 to kind of listen to sounds around the Earth.

[00:48:37] So we’ve got state agencies, federal agents. Yeah. It’s been a ride and every time we launch a new project, I just feel like at least I have a place where I know people can get that data in real time. Yeah. And great that we could merge at some point with maybe other, we, we’ve actually taken in other data portals that have closed down and we’ve, taken in their data sets. But still, I don’t think everyone finds the data that they would like. So what we do is package it up with metadata and we send some of this data over to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility or GBIF or we send it over to the Environmental Data Initiative, EDI.

[00:49:21] And lots of people know scientists in particular to go there to get. Data sets for grant proposals, for thesis projects, et cetera. So yeah, data management, data sharing is always gonna be challenging. I don’t ever see an end to the challenges there, but I think that getting things into accessible portals is really important that it doesn’t sit on people’s laptops and go nowhere.

[00:49:49] Sarah Kirn: Jane, thanks for bringing up Anecdata. Anecdata is gonna be one of, I think six platforms that we are featuring in an upcoming NASA Citizen Science Leaders event that we’re co-hosting actually with the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences. Kind of inviting those, some of those platforms that do host projects like Anecdata, like the Zuni over to come and share what’s the latest and greatest about their platform.

[00:50:15] What kind of projects do they best support? And then have a conversation about artificial intelligence, personal identifiable information, all the things that we care about. But I am a huge, after having built two platforms for participatory sciences, I’m a huge advocate for really trying your best to find a platform, an existing platform that can support the question that you wanna pursue.

[00:50:40] Jane Disney: For sure. We send people with bird projects over to eBird, for example. Still, they wanna use Anecdata sometimes because you can put absence data.

[00:50:52] Eric Miller: Congratulations on the success of Anecdata. It’s, I pulled it up. It’s, they just have to map in front of me the distribution of where these projects are. And it’s so cool. Middle of nowhere in Kazakhstan, like that’s incredible.

[00:51:04] As we close out our conversation thank you all so much for being here and it’s been a joyful scientific conversation. I really appreciate that and I think the world can use it sometimes and I’d like to know what gives you all hope in terms of the participation in science that you are seeing nowadays and will maybe continue or increase in the near future.

[00:51:27] Jane.

[00:51:29] Jane Disney: I have to say that I don’t see the pessimism in kids and teachers that I sometimes see in adults in the world. I think that there’s just many hopeful, fresh, young minds out there that once they discover that there is a path to addressing problems and maybe even solving problems, that they feel like, okay, that’s how we will move through all of these difficulties.

[00:51:58] And they do it with such grace and joy, as you were noting, we were experiencing ourselves here a minute ago, so I’m just hopeful that kids are just who they are. They’re just open for good things to happen in the world, and that there’s adults who are willing to. Yeah, teachers are heroes, right? That they’re willing to take that journey with kids over and over again year after year, another crop of kids comes in and the teacher takes that journey again.

[00:52:28] So I just really am struck by all of the people that I work with, and these kids and teachers in particular are gonna be making waves for the foreseeable future, so I’m hopeful about that.

[00:52:41] Eric Miller: Couldn’t agree more. Linda, how about you?

[00:52:44] Linda Silka: It’s such an exciting time because in certain ways people are starting to realize that science doesn’t belong to scientists. It belongs to all of us. We all have something to offer and we all can learn about it. You know that it’s not that you have to have this. Huge brain, but that there’s a lot that we can learn and do. And it’s an exciting time. And boy, I wanna follow Sarah and Jane both around. I would just learn so much.

[00:53:14] Eric Miller: Me too. Sarah, how about you? What gives you hope about people participating in science?

[00:53:19] Sarah Kirn: When I look around at the world today, there’s a lot to be concerned about. There’s increasing distrust of scientists, of science, of expertise in general. You see that in a vaccine suspicion, on and on.

[00:53:33] There’s also, I think, our society and our world, we have some lingering mistrust of each other that maybe stems back from COVID. People don’t connect the way they used to do in person in their neighborhoods with people not like them. And there’s a lot of work, especially looking at public health and water quality, air quality that used to be done by the federal government that’s not being done.

[00:53:57] And all of these things participatory science can handle and can do. So there’s both new need for participatory science. Also looking at what happens within a participatory science project. We do connect people. We connect people with scientists or people without science training, with people with science training.

[00:54:22] People discover firsthand, have that experience of doing something that they couldn’t do. Alone scientists enter into conversation with untrained scientists and practice communicating in ways that everybody can understand, in ways that really build trust of science and how it operates. And the participants also get to understand, why should I trust science? How rigorous is it? How many checks and balances? How does the whole enterprise work? So I see huge opportunity and need for more participatory science, both for doing some of the science that’s not being done right now that needs to be done, but also for giving people really positive experiences of each other and of themselves and of science.

[00:55:09] I’m hopeful because I think we’re actually sitting in a really bright part of space right now, and that of this whole world. I think it’s, there’s really amazing things happening within our projects, and the more we can do to support people reflecting and recognizing what’s happening, I think the better.

[00:55:26] So that gives me a huge amount of hope, despite the challenges of the world today.

[00:55:32] Eric Miller: It’s a great place to end it. Thank you all so much for your insights and expertise and for taking the time to chat today. We will also put some links to participation in some of the resources we talked about throughout this hour in the description of the show, in case people wanna check it out.

[00:55:47] So thank you all so much.

[00:55:53] If you enjoyed this episode and the previous discussions we’ve had on this podcast, please consider donating to the Maine Policy Review by visiting the journal’s website linked in the description. Our team includes Barbara Harrity and Joyce Rumery, co-editors of Maine Policy Review, and Jonathan Rubin, director of the Policy Center.

[00:56:10] Special thanks to professional writing consultant Kathryn Swacha, technical writer Nicole LeBlanc, and podcast producer, editor, and writer Jason Heim. Our podcast music is composed by Nathanael Batson. Visit MCSlibrary.org to learn about Margaret Chase Smith, the library, and our work in public policy and education.

[00:56:32] Find episode materials, the full transcript and resources in the description of this episode, and on the Maine Policy Matters website. Share your topic ideas via the form on our website and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can find all of our episodes wherever you find your podcast. And thank you for listening.