Collaboratively Creating a Citizen Science Website

In 2012, the National Park Service (NPS) partnered with researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) to create the first citizen science repeat photography website. Repeat photography is where photographs are taken from the same location over time, documenting the changes that occur. These photographs provide compelling evidence of the changes taking place on our planet, such as the disappearing glaciers of Glacier National Park. The website accompanying the photographs in this intervention provides a platform for NPS visitors to learn about climate change while also contributing to a scientific database by sharing their photographs. After developing the website, the project leader conducted a reflective study with the project team and created an instructive resource for future teams working on similar websites. Although the focus of this study was to investigate effective practices for collaboratively creating a citizen science website, the insights the authors discuss about teamwork could be applied to any number of projects.

The goal of the NPS and CSU collaboration was to provide a web platform for sharing the results of a citizen science project in Southwest Alaska, where NPS visitors have been invited to collect repeat photographs, or “before and after” photography, of the landscape. Repeat photography has been used in California to communicate the seriousness of the current drought by comparing photographs of reservoirs before the drought to photographs of what those reservoirs look like today. In Southwest Alaska, historical photographs can be compared to new photographs taken by park visitors and used to track changes in the landscape. The website created by CSU and NPS provides the coordinates of historic photographs and invites citizen scientists to post their comparison photographs. Citizen scientists, virtual visitors to the NPS website, and researchers are all encouraged to post their analysis of the repeat photographs, sparking discussions of how fast glaciers are receding; what kind of plants start to grow after a landslide or volcanic eruption, where soil erosion is occurring; and other changes in the landscape.

The core web development team was comprised of two CSU researchers and three NPS staff from Alaska. At the end of the development phase, which primarily took place through email and conference calls, the project leader initiated a reflective study of the collaborative process used to create the website. The researchers interviewed the five core team members about the collaborative process, asking questions such as, “What do you think [your team] did really well?” “What could [your team] have done differently?” “What were your goals coming into the project?” The team members' reflections were then analyzed to draw out common themes in their responses.

The results of this reflective study include advice for future teams working on similar citizen science web projects. The study suggests that the web development team should prioritize in-person meetings, especially early in the project when developing cross-institutional working relationships. Also, at the beginning of the project, the team should make an effort to clarify and streamline personal goals to define the overall goal of the project. Throughout the web development process, it would be beneficial to organize tasks in a central document that can be accessed by everyone on the team and edited as progress is made. One of these tasks should include creating a detailed marketing plan to get users interested in the site once it is launched. Finally, the researchers conclude that reflection and evaluation should be incorporated into the development process, rather than left until the end of the project. By using iterative reflection and evaluation, issues and discrepancies can be identified and addressed at an early stage.