Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to their classrooms back in São Paulo or Boston. This process extends and multi-
plies the participation experience through back-and-forth questions and answers on a
daily basis between students and their teachers because not everyone can participate
in the field.
Earth Watch does have a number of projects around the world that deal directly
with wetlands (Earth Watch 2008) such as the rehabilitation of acid-rain damaged
headwaters in the Czech Republic, the measurement of glacier surges and sediment
transfer and flooding in Iceland, the community-based restoration of mangroves in
Kenya, and the restoration of biodiversity to coastal wet grasslands in Estonia. One
such example that chief researcher David Harper from the University of Leicester in
England has been working on with Earth Watch for fifteen years concerns studying
the wetlands around several lakes in Kenya. Over this time period, seven hundred
Earth Watch volunteers from all over the world, from Kenyans to Australians, have
participated. An important offshoot of the project is its generation of local capacity,
such as an entire environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) as well as
many university theses and peer-reviewed publications. The project has both also
been awarded a Ramsar Prize and been designated as a Ramsar site of international
wetland importance. This case study is a nice testament of what can be achieved
when you engage volunteers from around the world in the scientific field research
process (Chandler 2004).
One of the principal questions for scientists is, can volunteers actually contribute
to collecting meaningful data? And the answer is, it depends on the task, the spe-
cific nature of the project, and the training and preparation of the volunteers. Earth
Watch volunteers have undertaken a vast variety of tasks in many water-related proj-
ects such as biological, biogeochemical, and physical sampling, and for landscape-
related projects such as vegetation/habitat mapping and sampling. Volunteers have
also proven useful with respect to the social sciences, whether it's archaeological
research, architectural surveys, mapping cultural landscapes, or interviews and atti-
tudinal surveys. Clearly there are cultural and language issues that need to be dealt
with depending upon the sorts of volunteers available or the people being engaged
with. But there are tremendous options, and in terms of being able to conduct rigor-
ous science, many stakeholder groups can be engaged toward meaningfully contrib-
uting to the data collection. And again, this gets back to the idea that in this Earth
Watch model, when people are engaged, it's not simply in a canned version of how
science is conducted (Chandler 2004). Volunteers actively participate in the collec-
tion of data that will be used through engaging in a real-life situation that adds value
to the experience for all.
CASE STUDY: THE PANTANAL WETLANDS
In addition to individual research projects, Earth Watch supports five to ten proj-
ects under what are called “conservation research initiatives,” where a field direc-
tor on the ground searches for and cultivates important research needs that can
be supported through the volunteer model. Emphasis is placed on disseminating
the results to multiple stakeholders as rapidly as the research results are gathered
(Chandler 2004).
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