LAVA-Lobos: Raising Environmental Awareness through Community Science in the Galápagos Islands

Abstract

Community science involves scientists and community members co-creating and co-executing scientific research. Given their deep engagement of non-scientists, these projects have great potential to improve their participants’ scientific knowledge and pro-environmental attitudes, as well as to collect first-order data on issues of local and scientific concern. To investigate this potential, we implemented a community science project to monitor an endemic species of sea lion in the Galápagos Islands and empirically assessed its impacts on the community scientists (local high-school students). We discovered that our community scientists increased their understanding of the nature of science, knowledge of sea lion biology, and intrinsic motivations for conservation as a result of their participation. These results provide empirical evidence that community science initiatives can be effective tools for helping community members to increase both their scientific knowledge and their environmental awareness.

Keywords

• community science
• citizen science
• biology education
• conservation
• pro-environmental attitudes
• sea lions
• galápagos islands