What
is "Effort"?
Citizen Science and Journey North
Thinking Carefully
About Methods
| How
could observers affect Journey North's results? |
| Ms. Bailey's class thought of 43 examples! |
Contributed
by Andy Davis, Emory University
You can think of “effort” as accounting for how much time
people spend observing, and/or how many observers there are.
For the individual observer effort, consider this example: If Jane from Georgia spends every waking minute of her day looking for monarchs in the spring, she's likely to see one. If Joe from Kansas happens to look outside on only one day during the spring and happens to see a monarch that day, then although both of these people saw a monarch, one person tried harder than the other to see it (i.e. they made more of an effort). And knowing this gives us an idea of how many monarchs were in Georgia versus Kansas.
As a (true) example for yearly effort - What if several people like Jane in Georgia spend all of their time looking for monarchs in a particular year (say 2004), and never find one, we would also want to know that, since it tells us that there were very few monarchs in Georgia last year, or so few, that most people didn't see one.
This example was true in my case last year, since I looked all spring and didn't see a singe monarch. In this example, knowing that there were lots of people looking, but no monarchs, it very important. However, we have no way to get this information now, as currently, there's no button on the Journey North website to push to show that you were looking but did not see anything.
In my case, even though I looked and looked, there was no way to input this information, and I wonder how many other people were the same way last year? Ideally, there needs to be a way to have observers "punch in" when they start looking for monarchs each season, and also when they stop, and several times in between to allow us to tell how many people were acually looking for butterflies each year. Then the JN staff can figure out how many people planned to watch for monarchs in GA before the monarchs even arrived, and also for how long they watched. Knowing this will be one way to know the "effort" made by observers each year.
Currently we can't do this, because people only report when they see a monarch, not when they don't. Thus, the number of monarchs reported to JN each year is exactly the same as the number of observers that year (because everyone eventually sees their first monarch sooner or later). If we knew how many people were watching for them, and then how many of those people actually saw a monarch, then we would know something about the abundance of monarchs each year, which as you know, is a very important issue.
So essentially, effort can refer to either of these issues. Again, you can think of it as accounting for how much time people spend observing, or how many observers there are.
Andy
Davis
Department of Environmental Studies
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia
