Day Seven: The Boston Harbor Islands and Citizen Science

WHO KNEW that there is a National Park a hop, skip and a jump from Boston? The Boston Harbor Islands were a mere 30-minute boat ride from the coast, and are a really neat example of science in your own backyard.

For me, the most noteworthy part of this day was the VERY apparent importance of volunteers. On a beautiful Saturday, we met more than a dozen individuals who donated their time to the preservation of these wonderful open spaces. Volunteers (including some youth!), with VERY limited staffing assistance from park rangers, not only do some hard labor (e.g., pulling invasive plants like pepper weed) on the islands, but they also spearhead a fair bit of citizen science. The island we visited participates in two major scientific studies.

One, called MIMIC (Marine Invader Monitoring and Information Collaborative), focuses on tracking the spread of invasives (like certain crabs, seaweed, mollusks, etc.) along the Atlantic coast in an effort to contain the invasives where they are currently located, and to know VERY quickly if an invasive species has moved to a new area so that they might stand a chance at getting rid of it. However, because inventorying is such a time-intensive task, they REALLY depend on volunteer support not just on this island but everywhere along the coast to collect data. I think this is a great model, but I do worry at the quality of the information being collected. They don’t really have an environmental education program to accompany the implementation of these studies, so (at least based on my morning participating in the study) it really seems like a lot of the volunteers are out of their depth. They are basically handed flash cards and dropped into the task to sink or swim. (I promise I will stop with the unintentional, bad puns).

I don’t expect every volunteer to become a marine ecologist, but some basic instruction like “This is how you pick up a crab,” or “This is where these types of creatures tend to live,” or “This is how you should methodically sample the area,” might have been worthwhile. I know that other citizen science programs (like dragonfly or frog monitoring in Chicago) require that you attend a training session before your data is counted; I wonder how a similar requirement might affect MIMIC’s participation rates. I also recognize that there was a HUGE crowd for the park ranger’s to monitor on the day of our visit, so I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that this was not how things are normally run. I would be interested to see how MIMIC is run at other sites, however, before I make a final judgment on the program’s efficacy.

The other citizen science activity going on looked at phenology on the island. I didn’t get to see that program in action, but I’m excited that I’m hearing about SO much of that research these days.

Some of my other ponderings prompted by the day included:

• Interpretation. I was thrilled at the mention of the field of interpretation. I’m a Certified Interpretive Trainer through the National Association for Interpretation, and I’m ALWAYS glad to hear of others tying conservation to interpretation. They really do go hand in hand! Some of the most intelligent scientists I know can’t explain themselves to laymen to save their lives; they spend so much time in academia that they lose touch with public understanding. So, interpretation focuses on synthesizing take-home messages and thinking about your audience as you craft a presentation, exhibit, etc. I might go so far as to say that any scientist with access to the public should be required to take a course in interpretation (because scientific findings are not especially useful unless people can understand them), but I DEFINITELY think that tour guides and educators should be well-versed in these concepts, and it seems like NPS and the Boston Harbor Islands have that covered.

• Dow Chemical and the weird relationship between chemicals and conservation. So, we watched a park ranger apply small amounts of an herbicide on the base of the most MASSIVE buckthorn TREES (yes, trees) I have ever seen. Someone asked where the chemical came from, and it’s DOW CHEMICAL. So, having spent a lot of time in Michigan, I have a bit of a personal issue with Dow. They’re basically perpetuating a Love Canal-esque level of water pollution in Midland, MI, and I flat out refuse to support their company with my dollars. That said, what do you do if the only way to control an invasive is to use one of their products?! I hate it when my values can’t seem to keep themselves straight; “black and white” is nice every once in awhile, you know?

Key questions:

• How are data from citizen science (like MIMIC or other programs) used? How much credibility can they have?