Dataset Information

Participating in a Citizen Science Monitoring Program: Implications for Environmental Education.

ABSTRACT: Tourism is of growing economical importance to many nations, in particular for developing countries. Although tourism is an important economic vehicle for the host country, its continued growth has led to on-going concerns about its environmental sustainability. Coastal and marine tourism can directly affect the environment through direct and indirect tourist activities. For these reasons tourism sector needs practical actions of sustainability. Several studies have shown how education minimizes the impact on and is proactive for, preserving the natural resources. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a citizen science program to improve the environmental education of the volunteers, by means of questionnaires provided to participants to a volunteer-based Red Sea coral reef monitoring program (STEproject). Fifteen multiple-choice questions evaluated the level of knowledge on the basic coral reef biology and ecology and the awareness on the impact of human behaviour on the environment. Volunteers filled in questionnaires twice, once at the beginning, before being involved in the project and again at the end of their stay, after several days participation in the program. We found that the participation in STEproject significantly increased both the knowledge of coral reef biology and ecology and the awareness of human behavioural impacts on the environment, but was more effective on the former. We also detected that tourists with a higher education level have a higher initial level of environmental education than less educated people and that the project was more effective on divers than snorkelers. This study has emphasized that citizen science projects have an important and effective educational value and has suggested that tourism and diving stakeholders should increase their commitment and efforts to these programs.

SUBMITTER: Branchini S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4511791 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Participating in a Citizen Science Monitoring Program: Implications for Environmental Education.

Branchini Simone S Meschini Marta M Covi Claudia C Piccinetti Corrado C Zaccanti Francesco F Goffredo Stefano S

PloS one 20150722 7

Tourism is of growing economical importance to many nations, in particular for developing countries. Although tourism is an important economic vehicle for the host country, its continued growth has led to on-going concerns about its environmental sustainability. Coastal and marine tourism can directly affect the environment through direct and indirect tourist activities. For these reasons tourism sector needs practical actions of sustainability. Several studies have shown how education minimizes ...[more]

PMID: 26200660

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Project description:An increasing number of citizen science water monitoring programs is continuously collecting water quality data on streams throughout the United States. Operating under quality assurance protocols, this type of monitoring data can be extremely valuable for scientists and professional agencies, but in some cases has been of limited use due to concerns about the accuracy of data collected by volunteers. Although a growing body of studies attempts to address accuracy concerns by comparing volunteer data to professional data, rarely has this been conducted with large-scale datasets generated by citizen scientists. This study assesses the relative accuracy of volunteer water quality data collected by the Texas Stream Team (TST) citizen science program from 1992-2016 across the State of Texas by comparing it to professional data from corresponding stations during the same time period. Use of existing data meant that sampling times and protocols were not controlled for, thus professional and volunteer comparisons were refined to samples collected at stations within 60 meters of one another and during the same year. Results from the statewide TST dataset include 82 separate station/year ANOVAs and demonstrate that large-scale, existing volunteer and professional data with unpaired samples can show agreement of ~80% for all analyzed parameters (DO = 77%, pH = 79%, conductivity = 85%). In addition, to assess whether limiting variation within the source datasets increased the level of agreement between volunteers and professionals, data were analyzed at a local scale. Data from a single partner city, with increased controls on sampling times and locations and correction of a systematic bias in DO, confirmed this by showing an even greater agreement of 91% overall from 2009-2017 (DO = 91%, pH = 83%, conductivity = 100%). An experimental sampling dataset was analyzed and yielded similar results, indicating that existing datasets can be as accurate as experimental datasets designed with researcher supervision. Our findings underscore the reliability of large-scale citizen science monitoring datasets already in existence, and their potential value to scientific research and water management programs.

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Dataset Information

Participating in a Citizen Science Monitoring Program: Implications for Environmental Education.

Publications

Participating in a Citizen Science Monitoring Program: Implications for Environmental Education.

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