Last year, I had the honor of presenting at the Southern California Citizen Science Symposium for Conservation on thinking about Citizen (or Community) Science as a community service. For several years, I’ve engaged and mentored high school students in their citizen science volunteer activities and worked with local educators to view citizen science as a service activity. This is powerful as it connects scientific data collecting with long term conservation and policy making goals as key to developing a healthy and sustainable community. In other words, students learn that through increased biodiversity knowledge, they can help to create a more biodiverse future and that the welfare of humans depends on this.
You can now view the presentation slides here: Citizen Science is Community Service by Rosalind Helfand