Celebrate urban birds: Exploring gateways to science for all

Background/Question/Methods:

The urban environment presents special challenges to ecologists wishing to gather data on bird distributions, abundance, and causes of mortality. While citizen science tools naturally attract highly educated people who are bird hobbyists or at least watch birds at their feeders, success in the urban environment requires that we attract people who may not be engaged in science, birds, or even informal learning activities focused on nature. The benefits of succeeding in these endeavors are fourfold:1) Increased capacity to address the issues of urban bird-habitat relationships at relevant scales, 2) Increased engagement of underrepresented communities in informal STEM learning activities, 3) Increased environmental awareness in populations most distant from nature, and 4) Increased community support for environmentally friendly attitudes, activities, and behaviors. Citizen science projects at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology represent an intentional blend of education with monitoring strategies, focusing on habitats, times of year, and geographic scales that are typically inaccessible to ecological researchers. What is fascinating about this work is that project design traverses the tensions and tradeoffs between what people will do, the educational support they require to do it well, and the scientific value of their efforts. Designing projects for underserved urban audiences is most challenging and to meet this challenge we have developed a gateway project, which is bilingual, incorporates the arts in exciting and culturally sensitive ways, reaches communities through local partnerships, and presents learning tools, web interfaces, and kits specifically designed to engage broad audiences.

Results/Conclusions:

The success of Celebrate Urban Birds! is demonstrated in the large number of partnerships it has garnered as well as the buy-in it has received from federal programs and the corporate world.  This presentation will illustrate the design features of “Celebrate Urban Birds!,” which allowed us to reach a breadth of audiences not necessarily tuned in to birds, biodiversity, ecology, or conservation.  This audience differs substantially from the audience previously reached by Cornell’s citizen science projects.  By creating a simple, meaningful project and focusing on use of multiple gateways to science through the arts, science, gardening, and community building, we believe we have achieved a first step toward coordinated national bird monitoring with fair representation of the diversity of habitats and people living in cities.