Katie Moon, Sophie Yates, Maureen Thompson and Corey Callaghan have published a paper in People and Nature about frogs, citizen science, and agential realism. Here they explore their findings about how we can think more relationally in the field of citizen science.

Figure 1: Traditional view of citizen science – person takes recording of frog

Citizen science involves public participants helping scientists by collecting and classifying data. It’s important to understand participant engagement so that we know how to get better data through citizen science.

In this post we’ll be using the case study of FrogID, which is a citizen science app where participants record frog calls to contribute to a national database for frog conservation. Volunteer validators identify the frogs in each recording and participants receive feedback about what species they recorded. With over 42,000 participants and over a million frog records, FrogID offers rich insights into how people engage with nature through citizen science.

Traditional citizen science views participants as separate from their observations, aiming for objective data collection. So at its most simple, we can envision FrogID participation like Figure 1, where a human records a frog.

A relational lens on FrogID participation

But we were interested in how using FrogID might change people’s relationships in various domains. Partnering with the Australian Museum, which runs the program, we interviewed 30 keen citizen scientists about how they used FrogID and what it meant to them.

We probed for how participation in this initiative changed their relationships with frogs, with other people, with nature, and with themselves (see Figure 2). We found that although everyone’s story was different, these four kinds of relationships were bound up in how people used FrogID, and they also changed as a result.

For example, some people…

We also realised that some people were serious froggers who wanted to record systematically, or every day – but others just liked to take the app along on hikes, or sit on their back step and record whatever happened to be out there. There were many different ways to engage with FrogID, and participation varied according to very individual sets of circumstances and relationships, and how these developed over time.

But then it started to get even more complex. Looking at our data, we felt that our initial analysis on the four domains of relationships was creating artificial boundaries, or a reduction of the data, in ways that were not true to the data itself. Our relationship-oriented analysis denied the ‘relationality’ of the data itself: the inseparable intra-actions that produce citizen science. Importantly, we felt the data analysis was not revealing the depth and richness of the webs of intra-actions being shared by participants, or the associated emotions. So we shifted our analysis framework from categorising uni- or bi-directional relationships, to one of revealing intra-acting webs of experiences and transformations; not ‘things’ but ‘doings’.

Agential realism

To understand these ‘doings’, we drew on the philosophical perspective called ‘agential realism’, which sees all entities—humans, animals, technology—as interconnected. Agential realism got us thinking about how this interconnectedness, or ‘intra-action’, shapes our experiences and the data we collect.

We identified three key elements of how agential realism applies to citizen science (Figure 3):

‘Intra-action’, or the interconnected agency of all entities: In citizen science, observations are influenced by how everything involved (the observer's senses, their behaviour, their technology, who else is there, the environment) interacts. By looking at intra-actions within the data, we found that the type and frequency of recordings are shaped by (a) relationships with other people and (b) with Nature, and (c) the experiences people have when they record.

‘Material becoming' highlights what becomes meaningful through our actions and experiences: We uncovered how different forms of meaning related to (a) feedback, (b) social networks, and (c) personal well-being influence engagement with the app and therefore influence what ‘matters’ in citizen science (because the things that get recorded are the things we pay attention to). For example, personal feedback from frog call validators was very motivating for some people, inspiring them to try harder to get better recordings.

‘Responsibility' emphasises that we are accountable for our effects on the world and what data we include or exclude from citizen science: Participants expressed responsibilities tied to their involvement in citizen science, including (a) responsibility to create knowledge, (b) to conserve frog habitat and Nature more generally, and (c) to educate self and others.

Opportunities for citizen science

This new perspective opens up a world of possibilities. Citizen science isn't just about gathering data - it's about nurturing a deep, meaningful connection with the world around us.

For project organisers, relational thinking offers valuable insights on how to keep people engaged and improve data quality. We invite them to consider:

The diversity of intra-actions that can arise from engagement and the potential for multi-dimensional positive feedback.
How program design can influence what, and who, comes to matter and the potential to improve social and interspecies justice.
How citizen science programs, including their design, are themselves agentic in forming, shaping and enabling the responsibilities of participants.

For participants, we see that citizen science is a chance to contribute to knowledge advancement and environmental stewardship while enriching their own lives through learning and social connection.

Read the full open access article here!

Reference: Moon, K., Yates, S., Callaghan, C. T., & Thompson, M. (2024). The relational nature of citizen science. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10709

Content moderator: Sophie Yates

Using popular smartphone app FrogID to think about the relational nature of citizen science

A relational lens on FrogID participation

Agential realism