Building a co-created citizen science program with gardeners neighboring a superfund site: The Gardenroots case study.

IntroductionTypically community members living in contaminated communities are the ones who initially identify adverse ecological and health outcomes associated with toxic exposures (1), although a state agency, regional US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) office, or the responsible party may make this discovery. The USEPA may add the site to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Information System, which can lead to a cascade of regulatory and/or remedy events. Typically at National Priorities List (NPL) sites with groundwater contamination, the time from discovery to remedy implementation can go beyond 20 years, and long-term management (i.e. decades to centuries) is needed at many sites (2). As time passes, site managers are responsible for monitoring the progress of remediation and engaging the community to inform them of the cleanup progress and describe potential risks associated with the site.Traditionally, site managers engage the community in a one-way communication model that solely aims to inform, change behavior, and assure populations that the determined risk is acceptable and that cleanup is underway (3, 4). This communication strategy has a low rate of success, primarily because it excludes those most affected (3) and fundamentally does not aim to increase environmental education or involve the community in the decisions about their risk. Historically, because communities were not involved in the decision-making process, mistrust often eroded the relationships between scientists, regulatory officials, and the affected communities (5, 6).The lack of public participation at contaminated sites is a great loss, as community members have been contributing to science since the 17th century (7, 8) and in general, volunteerism is considered critical to civic life in the United States (9, 10). Volunteers have monitored watershed health in more than 700 programs in the US, involving over 400,000 local stakeholders (11) and most ecological research once fostered public participation in most or all of the steps in the scientific process (8). However, due to the professionalization of science, the role of the amateur scientist has diminished (8). The value of public participation in addressing environmental and health issues has received renewed attention in the past couple of decades through efforts such as public participation in scientific research (PPSR)/ citizen science (12), community based participatory research (CBPR) (13), popular epidemiology (14), and street science (15).Public participation in scientific research, often termed citizen science, is a form of informal science education, and is broadly defined as a partnership between scientists and non-scientists in which authentic data are collected, shared, and analyzed (12, 16, 17). Citizen science projects are meant to increase a participant's scientific literacy (12), to collect field data to monitor a variety of environmental conditions (7), and as a framework to support and enhance decision-making in modern society (17, 18). Previous research in science education and sociology has demonstrated the need to engage communities in scientific research and that this level of engagement can be successfully facilitated via community-academic partnerships. Members of a community neighboring a contaminated site are typically intrinsically motivated to learn more about the issues regarding the contaminated site in their community and in most cases, have already begun to gather additional scientific data hypothesize other potential routes of exposure and areas that need additional monitoring. Research related to inquiry-based education has elucidated how people have a greater motivation to engage and learn when the subject matter is directly related to their lives and if the learning process is interactive (19). Popular epidemiology, a community-driven practice, was proposed after observing the activities of communities experiencing contamination and entails community initiation of investigations, gathering of scientific knowledge, and, if necessary, recruiting of scientific professionals (14). …