Climate Change in the Classroom – A Case for Utilizing Citizen Science in School Education

Scientific enquiry has long been the domain of highly trained professionals. Often, the outcomes of such research are paywalled within highly specialized scientific journals. These are, more often than not, written in jargon that may be accessible only to researchers working in that specific field of enquiry. This may lead to the exclusion of non-trained persons from directly using or benefiting from scientific research.

Citizen science overcomes this exclusion by providing opportunities for members of the public to voluntarily participate in one or more of the different stages of scientific enquiry – identifying a scientific problem of interest to the community, collecting information to address the problem, curating and analyzing data to infer patterns and utilizing outcomes of such research in developing robust solutions. Citizen science has tremendous scope to achieve transdisciplinarity across environmental, health and social sciences.

Engaging volunteers in citizen science projects gives them an opportunity to closely interact with the natural world, while collaboratively addressing a collective problem. Biodiversity citizen science – projects that are specifically targeted at observing and quantifying aspects of biodiversity – is now recognized as a powerful tool in creating awareness and asking questions about the environment, ecology and conservation.

Citizen scientists in such projects usually span a range of age groups, and depending upon the complexity of the question being addressed, can also involve observations and contributions from children, especially school-going students. The value of integrating citizen science in mainstream school curriculum has been recognized for not just promoting scientific literacy, awareness and community engagement, but also self-learning and attachment to nature. Biodiversity citizen science projects also influence individual learning outcomes among school children, including an increase in interest, motivation, skill and positive attitudes towards nature.

In India, biodiversity citizen science is emerging as a bridge between education and biodiversity assessment, and is being applied to understand and address environmental problems, including climate change. Globalwarming induced climate change is a slow, large-scale environmental process, and usually perceivable through the unusual frequency and magnitude of weather phenomena. Children often get acquainted with the idea of climate change through environmental studies curricula in schools, which focus on fossil fuel combustion and alternative energy sources – yet another set of facts to remember and recall during an examination.

Climate-change awareness is also overwhelmingly focused on negative and catastrophic impacts, especially on humans. While it is imperative that children be aware of the impacts of overusing limited sources of energy, a more hands-on and compassionate approach to understanding climate change through observing and interacting with biodiversity in their surroundings, may create better opportunities for inculcating attitudes of guardianship towards the environment.

An easily observable and documentable phenomenon that is highly sensitive to climate change, is phenology – the study of seasonal, cyclical changes in living organisms. Tree phenology gives valuable information about aberrant temperature and precipitation through changes in the timing of leafing, flowering and fruiting. Alterations in tree phenology can affect life cycles and phenology of all other organisms downstream in the trophic chain, and these cascading impacts are more apparent in temperate systems.

For instance, temperate trees respond to rising global temperatures by advancing the timing of leaf and flower emergence to coincide with global-warming induced earlier onset of the spring season. Early emergence of new leaves in temperate oaks has led to the early emergence of invertebrate larvae that feed on these leaves, which in-turn has led to early nesting in songbirds that feed these larvae to their young.

A similar understanding of the link between climate change, tree phenology, and trophic interactions like the example described above is unknown from ecologically complex tropical regions of the world, including most of India. To begin with, temperature seasonality of tropical regions is very different from that of temperate regions. There is no metabolically costly winter season, and trees can grow throughout the year. Climate change signals in these areas may thus reflect in the seasonality of other weather patterns, such as rainfall. In order to infer climate change impacts on ecological systems, one must gather information at very large spatial (country-wide) and temporal (decades) scales.

In India, long-term phenological information is available from a few forest habitats only, on species that are not very widespread, or restricted to protected areas such as wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. In order to overcome this information gap, citizen science is a wonderful and reliable mechanism to generate information over large spatial scales and over the long term.

Citizen scientists, including school children, have been collecting and contributing information on plant phenology around the world. The USA National Phenology Network (www.usanpn.org) monitors the phenology of plants and animal species to understand how the seasonality of organisms has changed in the present as compared to historically known baselines. Data collected in the project shows an advancement in spring leaf phenology of select plant species across the US in the year 2021 as compared to historically known behaviour of these plants.

There is a spatial difference in the advancement and delay of plant phenological behaviours across the US as demonstrated by data contributed by citizen scientists. Information like this can help scientists and policymakers assess impacts of climate change on vegetation. It can also act as an excellent pedagogical tool in involving citizens in the documentation and understanding of climate change and its effects on all life forms.

Season-Watch is a citizen science initiative tracking the phenology of 149 common tree species across India. Since the project started in 2010, over 5.5 lakh observations on >1,80,000 trees have been contributed by >1,500 individuals and thousands of students from over 1,600 schools. Season-Watch is accessible to citizen scientists through a website (www.seasonwatch.in) and through a free Android mobile phone application (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=seasonwatch.in).

The website and the app allow users to register themselves with the Season-Watch network, register a minimum of one tree and make observations about the phenological status of a registered tree on a weekly basis. Data from 2011-2021 on the seasonality of the most observed, culturally beloved species such as Mango and the Indian Laburnum, especially in Kerala, have revealed high variability in the peak timing and quantum of flowering and fruiting of these species. Therefore, long-term observation on more trees is essential and important to draw correlations with the contemporary environment and to predict changes under future climate scenarios.

Summaries of species’ seasonality are available publicly (https://www.seasonwatch. in/sw-user/explorepatternonmap.php), and raw data are also available to the larger public upon request. Crucially, the project provides children and adults an opportunity to go outdoors regularly, and to meaningfully contribute to scientific research while understanding the larger context of climate change.

Season-Watch is primarily driven by educators (i.e., schoolteachers and teacher trainers) and students. Nearly 85% of all data that comes into Season-Watch is contributed by school students, especially from Kerala. Schools offer opportunities for teachers and students to make observations over the long-term in wooded campuses. In Kerala schools, the same trees have been observed for up to 8 years by different batches of students.

At Season-Watch, we do not engage directly with children. Instead, we train educators in making observations. They, in turn, train students in their classrooms, typically grades 6th to 9th. We identify exceptionally motivated educators, and provide them with opportunities for capacity-building through workshops and resource-sharing.

Since 2018, Season-Watch has engaged with educators through annual meetings where they are provided training in concepts like sampling and statistics, using art in exploring nature, and immersive experiences in nature (reports available here and here). We also have formal conversations with educators and seek feedback on their experience in using citizen science in teaching concepts within their classrooms.

School teachers find great value in using biodiversity citizen science in explaining concepts in schools such as plant-animal interactions, life cycles of organisms, and even bird migration. Schoolteachers have communicated to us the need to integrate SeasonWatch into mainstream curriculum to inculcate skills such as identification of species, systematic observation, and handling data, in addition to creating a sense of attachment towards nature among their students. Teachers also recognize several curricular links, especially in middle and high school Biology, with SeasonWatch. We recorded anecdotes from government schoolteachers who participate in SeasonWatch from Meghalaya, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala to understand the utility of citizen science in school education (The relevant video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyEPDbVKJA&t=560s.)

Going forward, Season-Watch wishes to use this treasure-trove of educator experience to create and curate teaching and learning resources to learn about the environment in a hands-on way. One way to achieve this would be to engage with educators regularly, understand their requirements, and co-create resources that utilize citizen science as a pedagogical tool. At Season-Watch, we believe that everyone has a right to practice science. Providing children with the opportunity to observe nature regularly is a way of empowering them to take constructive action in the face of global problems like climate change. We hope that in the coming years our community of practising educators will grow to include many others from across India. We plan to achieve this by making multilingual resources accessible to those who wish to bring a documentation component to understanding the environment in their classrooms.

Citizen science projects like SeasonWatch offer immense scope to learn about the environment in the classroom in a participatory, rather than instructional, manner. We hope that educators and students join and contribute to the myriad citizen science projects in India, bringing valuable new scientific insights – one observation at a time.