Participatory Science for Equitable Urban Biodiversity Research and Practice

Abstract

Abstract Citizen, community, and other forms of participatory science are incredibly valuable tools for documenting the natural world—especially in cities—while simultaneously involving the public in the process of science. This engagement is critical for building an awareness and sense of belonging to nature. However, crowdsourced data that result from citizen science are invariably structured by the biases in who does and does not participate in these studies. For example, breeding bird observations tend to be disproportionately made by White, relatively affluent participants that are 400 times more likely than chance to work in STEM fields. These observers tend to observe the places they live and frequent, more so than other parts of cities. Accordingly, our understanding of the diversity and distribution of urban biodiversity is spatially biased by the geographic structuring of race and wealth in cities, as well as the racial and socioeconomic nonrandomness of who participates in crowdsourced studies. This work reviews these spatial racial gaps, focusing on data from across diverse cities. Further, it considers the historic factors in the US that led to the spatial structuring of race in modern American cities. The work concludes by detailing some of the approaches that can be used to account for the biases in our understanding of urban biodiversity, while identifying the opportunities that are implicit in seeing that diversity in a less biased way. It highlights the kinds of discoveries that are possible by resolving urban/rural, spatial-racial, and global gaps in datasets.

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