Blog Post by Rowan Converse, BEMP’s Data Manager and Bosque School and BEMP Alumna

I traveled from the banks of the Rio Grande to the upper reaches of the Mississippi River to represent BEMP at the Citizen Science Association Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, from May 17th-20th, 2017. While the weather was cold and grey throughout the conference, the presentations were colorful and vibrant! Participants from all over the world gathered to showcase their work and further the knowledge of this rapidly expanding field. I listened to presentations covering everything from community biotechnology labs in New York City to triangulating the position of meteorites fallen to Earth in Australia, to urban wildlife monitoring in Bangalore, India. I was most inspired by the keynote address by Marc Edwards and LeeAnne Walters, a university researcher and citizen team who were instrumental in uncovering the lead poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan. I felt like their story was a testament to the incredible power of citizen science to give communities the tools they need to create change.

Rowan Converse’s Opening Slide at the CSA Conference in Minneapolis

I gave a talk based on a paper my colleagues at BEMP and I wrote last year called, “Bringing Citizen Science into Land Management.” For this paper, we interviewed seven of our natural resource manager partners to determine how they used our data and what we at BEMP did that helped make our data the most accessible to them. We used this information to describe a framework that other citizen science programs could use to engage with natural resource managers, and this became BEMP’s first peer-reviewed publication! I originally pitched this topic to my colleagues at BEMP because of my experiences at the 2015 Citizen Science Association Conference in San Jose, California, where I heard from a number of programs collecting valuable data that wasn’t being incorporated into environmental decision making. You can view our findings and the paper at https://jcom.sissa.it/author/rowan-converse

Working in the field of citizen science, I feel privileged to be a part of such a vibrant and enthusiastic community of researchers, educators, and organizers. It was an amazing experience to represent BEMP on the global citizen science stage and I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to do so!