Web-based citizen-science as a tool for combined study of natural and human systems

Janis Dickinson, Cornell University, USA

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology creates Web applications for citizen-science data collection and visualization. We engage public audiences in bird monitoring across the globe, and scaffold monitoring with educational and social tools. Recently, we launched YardMap.org, which merges the benefits of centrally-guided citizen science with social tools designed to support a wide array behavioral practices thought to improve the quality of residential landscapes for wildlife and for humans. YardMap is an integrated, socially networked, mapping environment designed to support the shift toward more sustainable norms of environmental behavior. It serves as a community platform for displaying, augmenting, and discussing practices, ranging from water use and gardening to bird monitoring, keeping cats out of the wild, and pesticide use. Designed to support cooperation by combining habitat management with bird monitoring, it is also an experimental platform for adaptive co-management of coupled natural and human systems, and explores the idea of creating a citizen science ecosystem or learner’s world, where learning, monitoring, and co-management are seamlessly entwined.