By Richard Bell
Even the abbreviation is a mouthful: ESCOM--The Eastern Shore Citizen Science Coastal Monitoring Network.
But as Dalhousie researcher Dr. Camilo Botero explained at the Natural Building East conference at the Deanery Project on May 11, the concept of citizen science is deceptively simple: “Citizen science is about curiosity,” Botero said. “A scientist that is not curious is not scientist at all because we are curious. We are all asking questions the whole time.”
Citizen science involves putting the gathering of basic scientific data into the hands of citizens. “Once we decide to follow the scientific method to answer these questions, we are doing science,” Botero said. “That’s as simple as that. You don’t need to study for a PhD. And citizen science is power, the power of information. Before the Internet, we had to search for information in libraries and books. We have too much information now, and we need to have some skills to pick the right information that we need.”
Botero is leading ESCOM, putting together small teams of people along the Eastern Shore from the Canso Causeway west to McNab’s Island in Eastern Passage. The project is a small part of a national research program, with funders including Dalhousie University, the Rural Community Foundation of Nova Scotia, and the Diocesan Environmental Network, an environmental group of the Anglican diocese of Nova Scotia and P.E.I.
Citizen science is bottom-up, not top-down, putting the data directly into the hands of the people. “We’re always thinking about science as top-down,” Botero said. “And we’re always asking the government that they do things for us, because we say, because we pay taxes. That's true, but taxes are not enough, and we don't want to pay more taxes. So instead of asking things, we can just do it by ourselves. We don’t need to pay more taxes, in a way that they do with bureaucracy.”
ESCOM’s beach program focuses on three things, starting with doing monthly checks of the beach profile using some simple survey equipment. “People are worried about beach erosion,” Botero said, “but how do we know that we really have beach erosion? Could be just seasonal movement of the beach, and it's no erosion at all, it's just that it's moving. Or maybe the erosion is not because of the sea level rise, maybe it’s because someone decided to build a seawall in some bay close to us, and now we have erosion.”
Next in line is gathering data on the plants at the beach. “We’ll also be including animals in the future,” Botero said. “But we are starting with flora for one simple reason: plants don’t move.” Participants will take photos of beach plants and identify them by using an online program.
The plant research will fill in a major gap in our knowledge about beaches. “We will have the first record ever of what species are on the beaches,” Botero said. “We looked, and we didn’t find any publications or catalog of our beach vegetation. We have so many invasive species. If we don't know which are the native species, we can’t tell which plants are colonizing the beaches.”
Botero also demonstrated how citizen scientists along the Eastern Shore were using a basic weather station to create much more detailed information about local climates. When he started, there were only two Weather Canada websites for the entire Eastern Shore. Now there are more than ten. Participants buy their own home weather stations for $200 each. The stations are connected to the Internet, giving climate scientists a much more detailed and up-to-date picture of weather changes.
For more information about ESCOM, joining a local group, or becoming part of the weather network, send an email to Dr. Botero at [email protected].
