Science by the People: Grassroots Environmental Monitoring and the Debate Over Scientific Expertise

Heiman, Michael K.

doi:10.1177/0739456x9701600405

Cited by 41 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Citizen science complements and enhances more conventional scientific studies (Eden 1996, Heiman 1997, Au et al 2000, Pattengill-Semmens and Semmens 2003. The role of citizen science in the realm of ecological monitoring is particularly valuable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen, Science, Highways, and Wildlife: Using a Web-based GIS to Engage Citizens in Collecting Wildlife Information

Lee¹,

Quinn²,

Duke³

2006

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Road Watch in the Pass is a citizen-science project that engages local citizens in reporting wildlife observations along a 44-km stretch of Highway 3 through Crowsnest Pass in southwestern Alberta, Canada. The numbers of wildlife vehicle collisions and a recent proposal to expand the highway have raised concerns from both human safety and wildlife conservation perspectives. Through the use of a web-based GIS, interested citizens can contribute information that will be instrumental in making final decisions concerning measures to mitigate the effects of highway expansion. Currently, 58 people have contributed over 713 observations to Road Watch. We performed a preliminary comparison of 11 months of Road Watch observations and wildlife mortality data for the same time period to demonstrate that the use of citizen science not only augments more conventional approaches, but also results in the emergence of new knowledge and insights. A Kappa index of agreement of 14% indicates poor agreement between the data sets, highlighting that wildlife successfully cross the highway in areas not identified by the wildlife mortality data. This has important implications for design and mitigation efforts for Highway 3 and other roadways.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen, Science, Highways, and Wildlife: Using a Web-based GIS to Engage Citizens in Collecting Wildlife Information

Lee¹,

Quinn²,

Duke³

2006

E&S

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“…This interdisciplinary body of research has shown that different types of knowledge and ways of representing the needs and conditions of a place influence the power and legitimacy of different actors' claims in spatial decision making. For instance, Gaventa (1993), Lake (1994), and Heiman (1997) have illustrated the greater power and relevance assigned to certain types of quantitative data and ''scientific'' or ''expert'' knowledge in spatial decision making, compared with the experiential knowledge often gathered through community organizing efforts. Spatial knowledge and cartographic representations produced using a GIS and other digital technologies are often given greater weight in planning and policymaking than knowledge presented in other ways (Aitken and Michel 1995;Elwood and Leitner 2003).…”

Section: Knowledge Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives

Elwood

2006

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

179

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The roles, relationships, and strategies of state and civil society institutions in urban planning, problem solving, and service delivery are in flux. In trying to understand how these changes affect community organizations, grassroots groups, and local-level institutions of civil society, existing research has tended to conceptualize these roles through a series of oppositional dialectics, such as cooptation or resistance. This article shows instead that community organizations shift their technological, institutional, and spatial approaches to urban planning and problem solving in creative and multifaceted ways. They produce a variety of spatial narratives to advance their agendas by strategically enacting multiple roles vis-à-vis a diverse set of actors and institutions. Information technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) can play a central role in this approach. Community organizations apply their own interpretive frameworks to GIS-based maps and images to produce spatial narratives of local needs, conditions, and assets that may be adapted to the diverse roles and relationships they negotiate in urban spatial politics. These arguments are developed from ethnographic research carried out with two inner-city Chicago community organizations pursuing a range of neighborhood improvement activities.

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“…Similarly, my own recent historical investigation of a paleontological quarry in the American West in the early twentieth century reveals that the resident ranching family, the Cooks, had highly valued experiential knowledge of where to prospect for fossils, knowledge that could not be easily replicated by visiting eastern scientists, who in turn possessed the cosmopolitan knowledge necessary to identify those fossils and situate them in a scientific taxonomy (Vetter 2008). Perspectives on the experiential and the cosmopolitan have been explored more recently in health and medicine, including lay-expert collaborative research on the environmental causes of disease, known as "popular epidemiology" (Brown 1987 and and in environmental science more generally, through grassroots environmental monitoring and other similar practices (Heiman 1997;Ottinger 2010;see also Fischer 2000). The interaction of experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge can also be readily seen in colonial contexts (Green Musselman 2003;Grove 1996;Leach and Fairhead 2002;Low 2007;Schiebinger and Swan 2005).…”

Section: Experiential and Cosmopolitan Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Lay Participation in the History of Scientific Observation

Vetter

2011

Sci Context

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Why and how have lay people participated in scientific observation? And on what terms have they collaborated with experts and professionals? We have become accustomed to the involvement of lay observers in the practice of many branches of science, including both the natural and human sciences, usually as subordinates to experts. The current surge of interest in this phenomenon, as well as in the closely related topic of how expertise has been constructed, suggests that historians of science can offer a valuable contribution to these vital questions. A historical approach to lay participation allows us to better understand the making of expert-lay relations in science, and it offers a broader, long-term perspective on contemporary debates about that boundary.

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Science by the People: Grassroots Environmental Monitoring and the Debate Over Scientific Expertise

Cited by 41 publications

References 8 publications

Citizen, Science, Highways, and Wildlife: Using a Web-based GIS to Engage Citizens in Collecting Wildlife Information

Citizen, Science, Highways, and Wildlife: Using a Web-based GIS to Engage Citizens in Collecting Wildlife Information

Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives

Introduction: Lay Participation in the History of Scientific Observation

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