Climate change in my neighborhood? Exploring local indicators of climate change through citizen science

Background/Question/Methods

For most Americans, climate change seems far removed from personal experience. Educators and researchers, aiming to impart the relevance of this crisis, often struggle to interpret this issue which can seem distant, diffuse, and laden with controversy.  

According to the Yale Project on Climate Change, public responses to this complex issue can be categorized into six diverse groups, from alarmed to dismissive, each group characterized as much by attitudes as by understandings. Whether segmented by attitudes or by ideology, if the public perceives a controversy, individuals often decide what to believe based on who they trust to impart credible information.  

The Communicating Climate Change initiative involves public participants in citizen science to make their own observations about the impacts of climate change on local indicator species. Twelve science centers across the United States facilitate established citizen science projects such as BudBurst and eBird, training participants to follow vetted protocols for making and reporting observations of locally meaningful impacts. Science center educators also work with participants to explore how current, local sightings may indicate phenological shifts or changing population trends in response to climate factors.

We investigate the ways in which opportunities to research local indicators of climate change through citizen science might impact participants’ understandings of, and attitudes towards, climate change. Focus groups conducted with science center visitors and project participants explored how attitudes among each center’s audience compare with attitudes of the broader American public. We analyze those findings in conjunction with project-specific surveys of citizen science participants and the YPCC’s surveys of American attitudes and understandings of climate change.  

Results/Conclusions

Although participants in citizen science projects run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology tend to be highly educated and hold positive views towards the environment, preliminary research also demonstrates an unexpected degree of skepticism and misunderstandings regarding climate science. This parallels findings by YPCC which suggest that, on the issue of climate change, the American public is more meaningfully segmented by ideology and cultural affiliation than by educational background and economic status. Preliminary evaluation work shows that science center visitors would trust citizen science observations made by others in the community, regardless of audience segmentation. While this does not imply more general trust across segmented groups about the issue of climate change, it does suggest citizen science is a promising strategy for communicating the local impacts of climate change to a diverse community beyond participants in the project.