Teaching people to 'like' science: Using Facebook to promote scientific discovery and exploration

Background/Question/Methods

The rapid adoption of social media globally presents ecologists with unprecedented opportunities to both educate and involve the public in environmental science. In recognition of the expanding influence of the internet, we are developing an exciting and innovative citizen science game on Facebook (https://apps.facebook.com/140369602412). In the game, players view photographs of wild animals captured by motion-detecting cameras. Through playing the game, users learn about the biodiversity of the Santa Cruz Mountains and provide a dataset for our project, saving us the labor of tagging thousands of photos. The app collects each player’s responses, which will allow us to gauge how accurately photographs are labeled and how quickly individual players improve. 

Results/Conclusions

Here, we present our preliminary game design and logic and discuss potential challenges. Following the success of similar projects, we expect that our game can potentially enlist hundreds of thousands of volunteers globally to contribute remotely to our research and learn about biodiversity conservation. Our game may form the basis for other citizen science projects in the future, and we hope to expand our photodatabase to include ecosystems from around the world as we forge collaborations with other interested scientists.