Rebuilding trust in science
Let them participate!
Door Alex Torres
By Alex Torres
Alex Torres
For four years now, during two periods in the months of January and February, hundreds of people in the Netherlands go outside, look up at the night sky and watch the constellation of Orion, trying to count its stars. If it is really dark around you, you will see over twenty. But if you are in a light-polluted area, it may be five stars or fewer.
This simple method helps researchers find out how dark the night really is nowadays, by providing them with hundreds of measuring points all over the country. But that’s not all it’s good for: the researchers are also engaging with the public, explaining the importance of darkness to people and highlighting the importance of science as a whole.
And that is extremely valuable, especially at a time when public trust in science is low. With ongoing debates around vaccine scepticism and climate change, making the public a part of science can bring these two sides together and help rebuild trust, Mohammad Gharesifard believes. He is an assistant professor of citizen science, a role that is unique in the Netherlands.
Benefits
Citizen science involves non-scientists in one or more steps of the scientific process. They might do so by collecting data, like with the darkness project. Sometimes they do the actual research themselves, like with the Sound Toll Registers, where people would enter data from old manuscripts detailing the thousands and thousands of ships who passed the Danish Sound between 1497 and 1857. Other times, citizens can also help design the study itself and define the research questions. An example is Making Sense, a citizen science project that aimed to address issues of noise and air pollution in several European cities.
Citizens now have a seat at a table that they normally are not present at
‘The approach can bring great benefits to science itself’, Gharesifard explains. ‘But the other angle is the democratisation of science and policy.’
It gives citizens access to processes of science and even policymaking that they usually don’t have access to. ‘When citizens monitor air quality, for example, and we invite them to discuss this issue with authorities or researchers, they now have a seat at a table that they normally are not present at. For me, this is even more important than the data collection element.’
He believes it is also how science can come closer to the public. ‘We, as scientists, can learn more about the issues that concern people. And the same goes for policymakers’, he says. ‘This way, we all avoid misunderstandings.’
Different expectations
In his own work, Gharesifard has already seen many examples of these fruitful discussions. ‘I was involved in a biodiversity project in Kenya’, he recalls. ‘We wanted to look at the animal populations in that region and study their movements to know how to best implement conservation actions.’
To achieve this, they decided to involve both the local community and local authorities, to get their input on the matter. Getting these two groups in the same room, discussing with each other, ended up completely turning the project around.
With this dialogue element, we also create a sense of ownership
‘From the very first meeting, we found out that they had completely different expectations on this issue’, Gharesifard says. While the authorities were concerned with protecting wildlife, as it stimulates tourism in the area, the citizens had serious concerns about their cattle, which is frequently attacked by wildlife. This could have easily been overlooked if they hadn’t involved citizens in the process.
‘It would have been easy to just develop an app for the citizens to collect data on wildlife’, Gharesifard says. ‘But with this dialogue element, we also create a sense of ownership of the issue within the citizens. This gets them truly involved, rather than just using a piece of technology. And that is what it’s all about.’
In the end, it was a win-win situation. ‘We designed a project that still collected information about wildlife movements to strengthen conservation efforts, but also focused on human-wildlife conflicts’, Gharesifard explains. ‘This way, the citizens had access to data about these incidents and could take precautions to avoid the most dangerous areas for grazing.’
Missteps
Now at the UG, Gharesifard is supervising a few new citizen science projects on topics such as water quality monitoring in fish farms in Indonesia, and disaster risk in the Netherlands, the second of which is quite relevant to the city of Groningen. ‘It’s about cascading disasters’, he explains. ‘For example, if there is an earthquake that also causes floods in the city.’
This project, that Gharesifard is co-supervising, aims to use citizen science to develop and validate a model of how people act during such disasters. ‘We want citizens to help us understand where people go in such cases, or if they would move on foot or by car, for example’, he says. ‘All of this can help us create a better model, which we can use to draw up advice for citizens and authorities on how to proceed in these events.’
When we start supplying citizen science, we lose track of what’s important
Still, he warns, citizen science is not a magic bullet. ‘We have to think of the feasibility of involving citizens in these projects’, Gharesifard says. ‘There are procedures in science that require a certain expertise, or equipment that is too expensive and can’t be distributed among citizen scientists. Sometimes, it is not even really necessary to involve a mass crowd to conduct the experiment.’
Another common misstep is that citizen science is shoehorned into projects, without considering whether the project is appealing to citizens or whether their participation is even necessary in the first place. ‘When we start supplying citizen science, instead of sitting down with citizens and seeing what their issues are’, he says, ‘that’s when we start to lose track of what’s important.’
‘If a chemistry researcher wants to measure chemical components in water, they may seek out the help of citizens, and that makes sense’, Gharesifard says. ‘But would this be something that appeals to the community? Would they benefit? That is a different question.’
Citizen science hubs
Still, Gharesifard expects interesting developments within the field in the coming years, especially in Groningen. Recently, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) issued a call for citizen science hubs around the country. Gharesifard, along with the university and other local organisations, is planning to bring one such hub to the North of the Netherlands. This would bring extra funding for projects, along with the possibility of establishing stronger supportive frameworks for citizen science activities in the region.
‘I think we’re a very strong candidate to form a citizen science hub’, Gharesifard says. After all, Groningen has a long history of working with the population on collaborative projects. Think of Science LinX, the Faculty of Science and Engineering’s science centre, or the university’s Science Shops, which connect societal organisations with students and researchers who can conduct research for them.
Finally, Groningen is one of the most comprehensive universities in the country, in terms of the different fields of science that are practised. ‘There’s a good combination of technical fields, but also social sciences, humanities, healthcare. This makes it very interesting for citizen science, which benefits from interdisciplinarity.’
As citizen science evolves, Gharesifard says, so does its potential across different fields. ‘I am really curious to see citizen science being applied in the humanities. There’s so much we don’t understand about the past, about cultural heritage, for example. And there’s a huge amount of data available too. There are still many possibilities for citizen science.’