The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Associated Restrictions on Participation in Community and Citizen Science

Citizen and community science can improve conservation efforts, help people connect with nature, and strengthen online social infrastructure during periods of disturbance. Volunteers for citizen and community science (CCS) projects engage in a variety of activities ranging from in-person group tasks to isolated online tasks. The diversity of available CCS engagement activity types was altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goals were to document the impact of COVID-19 (1) on participation in different types of CCS projects and (2) across a varying landscape of pandemic-associated restrictions. We examined digital trace data from SciStarter.org to examine participation in CCS projects before and during COVID-19. We created a summative index of different COVID-19 restrictions to quantify how daily life in each US state was impacted. We found that during the pandemic, projects in which data collection occurred away from home had fewer joins than other types of projects. This contrasts with pre-pandemic, for which there was no difference in joins among the different project types. Although there was a decrease in joins among away from home projects that occurred during the pandemic, the difference between pre-pandemic and during the pandemic was not statistically significant. There was no difference in joins among the different project types between individuals in states with few COVID-19 restrictions compared with individuals in states with many COVID-19 restrictions. Interviews conducted with project leaders reinforced these findings and provided examples of how projects could be modified to continue generating data and connecting communities.