Building Australia through citizen science

BACKGROUND Citizen science brings scientists and the wider community together to work on important scientific projects. It has played a central and celebrated role in the advancement of global knowledge. From amateur astronomers tracking the transit of Venus in 1874 to the Audubon Society’s 114 year-old Christmas Bird Count, people with a passion for science have worked alongside scientists for the benefit of the community. Today, more than 130,000 Australians are active in over 90 citizen science projects, predominantly in environmental science fields. Many kinds of organisations are also involved, including universities, all levels of government, schools, industry groups, community groups and museums

What Happens After a Shark Incident? Behavioral Changes Among Australian Beachgoers

Sharks (Selachimorpha) have an important ecological function and are both valued and feared by people around the world. Shark bite incidents present a high consequence risk in terms of human health and safety. In Australia, shark interactions with humans are most frequently recorded for the white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas), and tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier). Human anxiety of encountering sharks may be elevated relative to the actual level of risk due to intensive media coverage, which typically emphasizes a narrative of highly abundant animals actively targeting human water users. This narrative is not supported by scientific evidence. Public perceptions of shark incidents can strongly influence shark management efforts. To help management, we set out to understand how people change their behavior in response to shark incidents and why some behaviors do or do not change. In October 2019, we used 4 participatory workshops, attended by 60 people, and a visual communication approach to study the socioecological context of beachgoer behavior to sharks in a high shark incident region around Ballina and Byron Bay in New South Wales, Australia. Of all recorded comments captured at the workshops (174), 91% mentioned changes in behavior following the reported incidents, and 9% indicated no behavior change. The behavior changes generally did not result in less beach use but in different types of use. When beachgoers visited the beach and used the ocean, they implicitly asked themselves the following questions in selecting activities and behaviors: (1) how much risk do I think is present, (2) how much risk am I willing to accept, and (3) how much do I trust the information and advice available to me to mitigate these risks? We found that families, teenagers, and experienced beachgoers (such as surfers) used different socioecological information on which to base their risk assessments and that these groups had different risk profiles. Despite these variations, a common finding across beachgoers was a strong desire to improve the quality of publicly available and locally relevant information on risk factors. Using the graphic visualization of our findings for communication purposes can help beachgoers contextualize their own risk perception and learn from how others have changed their reported behavior. Sharing of behavior change information and risk reduction strategies can help target public investment in mitigation measures and may encourage further risk reduction strategies and policies to be implemented

Using ideal distributions of the time since habitat was disturbed to build metrics for evaluating landscape condition

Developing a standardized approach to measuring the state of biodiversity in landscapes undergoing disturbance is crucial for evaluating and comparing change across different systems, assessing ecosystem vulnerability and the impacts of destructive activities, and helping direct species recovery actions. Existing ecosystem metrics of condition fail to acknowledge that a particular community could be in multiple states, and the distribution of states could worsen or improve when impacted by a disturbance process, depending on how far the current landscape distribution of states diverges from pre-anthropogenic impact baseline conditions. We propose a way of rapidly assessing regional-scale condition in ecosystems where the distribution of age classes representing increasing time since last disturbance is suspected to have diverged from an ideal benchmark reference distribution. We develop two metrics that (1) compare the observed mean time since last disturbance with an expected mean and (2) quantify the summed shortfall of vegetation age-class frequencies relative to a reference age-class distribution of time since last disturbance. We demonstrate the condition metrics using two case studies: (1) fire in threatened southwestern Australian proteaceaous mallee-heath and (2) impacts of disturbance (fire and logging) in the critically endangered southeastern Australian mountain ash Eucalyptus regnans forest on the yellow-bellied glider Petaurus australis. We explore the effects of uncertainty in benchmark time since last disturbance, and evaluate metric sensitivity using simulated age-class distributions representing alternative ecosystems. By accounting for and penalizing too-frequent and too-rare disturbances, the summed shortfall metric is more sensitive to change than mean time since last disturbance. We find that mountain ash forest is in much poorer condition (summed shortfall 38.5 out of 100 for a 120-yr benchmark disturbance interval) than indicated merely by loss of extent (84% of vegetation remaining). Proteaceaous mallee-heath is in worse condition than indicated by loss of extent for an upper benchmark interval of 80\ua0yr, but condition almost doubles for the minimum tolerable time since last disturbance interval of 20\ua0yr. To fully describe ecosystem degradation, we recommend that our summed shortfall metric, focused on habitat quality and informed by biologically meaningful baselines, be added to existing condition measures focused on vegetation extent. This will improve evaluation of change in ecosystem states and enhance management of ecosystems in poor condition

Associations for Citizen Science: Regional Knowledge, Global Collaboration

Since 2012, three organizations advancing the work of citizen science practitioners have arisen in different regions: The primarily US-based but globally open Citizen Science Association (CSA), the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), and the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA). These associations are moving rapidly to establish themselves and to develop inter-association collaborations. We consider the factors driving this emergence and the significance of this trend for citizen science as a field of practice, as an area of scholarship, and for the culture of scientific research itself