Why teach anthropology students to use naturalist methods? How could digital apps like eBird and iNaturalist contribute to learning about anthropos? How can educators bring an anthropological sensibility to the growing use of digital tools for knowing the environment? As instructors of anthropology seminars in environmental anthropology and the anthropology of science, respectively, we’ve each found good reasons to ask students to use these digital tools. First, using these digital tools reveals existing ways of seeing and engaging with the environment, allowing for reflection on how students come to the classroom already prepared to identify, classify, interpret, and otherwise make sense of the world around them. Second, it offers opportunities for students to analyze for themselves how particular technologies influence those patterned ways in which they have been prepared to interact with the environment. Given their widespread popularity, these apps are culturally influential modes through which people learn about, record, and share information about the natural world. Finally, these apps are worth analyzing because, as they link diverse users with networks of professional researchers, they raise questions about popular forms of participatory science. Overall, group exercises using naturalist apps engaged students directly in matters central to our syllabi and allowed for peer dialogue about what it means to live in a rapidly changing environment.

In what follows, we describe how we have incorporated naturalist apps into our classrooms as an example of how they can be linked to specific course learning goals. For Damien, eBird offered an opportunity for students in his class, Science and Other Ways of Knowing, to reflect on citizen science. Using these apps, a set of binoculars, and a teaching protocol provided by eBird, students were able to reflect on the affective dimensions of citizen science. For Nimisha, iNaturalist allowed students to engage with a module on ecological imperialism and the colonial roots of plant taxonomy in her class Anthropology and the Environment. Using this app, students discussed the classification of plants as native, weeds, and crops and used the geographical distribution maps to debate the role of colonization in shaping human-plant relationships.

Using eBird: Hailing Citizen Scientists

In Damien’s class, eBird offered an opportunity to directly involve students in one of the largest and most widely publicized citizen science projects. One of the central learning goals of the class was to equip students to evaluate science as a set of thoroughly socially embedded practices with varying and consequential cultural forms. As one of the most influential frameworks for understanding the role of lay experts in the production of science, it was clear that “citizen science,” a term that has been used since the 1990s as a uniting label for diverse scientific projects that involve non-professionals (Strasser et al. 2019), would be a critically important subject for the class.

Launched in 2002, eBird is a digital database of bird observations initiated by the Cornell Ornithology Lab and the National Audubon Society. With a user base numbering in the hundreds of thousands, it has grown into a massive project built around user-submitted bird sightings. Combining a longstanding practice of soliciting public submission of bird counts with new digital tools, the eBird project has shed new light on changing population-level bird movements. Since 2014, these tools have used the related app Merlin Bird ID, which offers aids for identifying birds. In addition to a five-question identification protocol, Merlin incorporates AI-powered audio and image-based recognition software.

Preparing for this exercise took every bit as much intentional work as preparing for a lecture, but it was a different kind of work that brought me (Damien) to different kinds of resources. First, I took the free online eBird Essentials course and consulted the eBird Essentials for Educators Guide, which helped me create a lesson plan. The exercise was then divided across two days. On the first day, I prefaced our conversation with the central question we would discuss throughout the week: “What forms of science and what forms of society are being produced by citizen science projects?” 

We then jumped into the exercise. Students received a brief tutorial on bird identification using Merlin Bird ID and were divided into groups of three: One student used the app, one used binoculars (though they were asked to share), and one recorded the birds that were identified on a Cornell-provided paper-checklist. Students were encouraged to wander campus freely, and to move toward areas where they thought birds might be present. The ability to pull this off hinged on the support of Princeton’s Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department, which granted my class the use of binoculars for the day. 

How to bring this back to anthropology? When students returned from their birding exercise, each group reported their findings to me as I recorded them in a checklist on eBird.org. I left them with one question to consider before our next meeting: How did this experience make them feel? This question might not seem central to a critical analysis of citizen science, but it was one that asked students to stay close to their own experiences while reflecting on the assigned readings.

By the time they returned to class on Thursday, students had read two articles. The first one, Strasser et al.’s “ ‘Citizen Science’? Rethinking Science and Public Participation” laid out the central stakes of citizen science while encouraging students to think critically about the very concept. Though a widely applied term since the 1990s, there is no consensus on how to define citizen science, and Strasser et al. offer a helpful typology for categorizing projects by the kind of epistemic practices involved. We also read Maxime Polleri’s article “Conflictual Collaboration: Citizen Science and the Governance of Radioactive Contamination after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster.” This article concerns the formation of citizen science groups comprised of non-professional residents of Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. This case involved a significantly higher degree of “participation” (as evaluated with Arnstein’s “ladder of participation”) compared to eBird. However, Polleri finds that this instance of citizen science demonstrated a kind of “conflictual collaboration” in which residents resisted aspects of the Japanese state’s environmental monitoring while ultimately collaborating with the state’s goal of normalizing life with radiation. Each of these readings posed several compelling questions for discussion, and students’ experiences with eBird gave them a collective touchstone for the class conversation. I found it to be one of the more productive discussions we had during the semester.

So, how did participating in eBird make them feel? Students offered a range of affective states and were collectively more than capable of connecting these back to our larger question. A number of students reported feeling a sense of pressure. They were not just looking for birds, after all. They were producing data. My brief introduction of the eBird project and their role in it had done enough to instill in them a sense of responsibility for data quality. If they did a bad job, what kind of citizens would they be after all! A number of students expressed a new appreciation for, and curiosity about, their campus environment and its links to transcontinental migration patterns. If some versions of citizen science aim to sensitize the public and engage them in new concerns for the environment, then this seemed effective. Finally, some students reported frustration. Some parts of campus had very few birds!

Ultimately, we were able to recognize in our experience with eBird many of the issues raised by the critical literature on citizen science: varying degrees of “participation” in science, the deployment of specific sorts of epistemic practices by the public, the structuring of the entire experience by technology, and an affective experience that seemed conducive to specific social and political ends. Students seemed to agree that if eBird reified hegemonic social norms, these were largely norms with which the class was comfortable accepting. Nevertheless, it offered an avenue through which to evaluate a wide range of participatory science projects.

Using iNaturalist: Understanding Human-Plant Relationships

In my (Nimisha’s) course Anthropology and the Environment, we discussed colonial legacies of extraction shaping landscapes and human-environment relationships. A central component of this discussion was the form of the plantation and how it transformed local ecologies and people’s relationships with plants. In class discussions students began to talk about the distinction between native and introduced species and the colonial roots of this discourse on plant taxonomy. We were particularly focusing on selected chapters from Alfred Crosby’s book Ecological Imperialism and Amitav Ghosh’s book The Nutmeg’s Curse. 

Crosby argues that European colonialism across the world occurred not solely through a takeover of land and people but also a complete transformation of ecologies. He emphasizes that the plantation form devastated local ecologies and brought in new diseases, plants, and animals, while also introducing new classifications of plants as weeds and crops. In association with this book, we also discussed Ghosh’s compelling account of the Dutch colonial expansion through extractive plantation economies in the Banda islands in Eastern Indonesia. Particularly, students focused on Ghosh’s discussion on colonial extraction of plants as resources for imperial profits which destroyed local ecosystems. In connection with these discussions, students also brought up Robin Kimmerer’s short essay “The Serviceberry,” which talks about indigenous knowledge and the ethic of reciprocity present in plant worlds, which we had read earlier that week. Across these texts, students were drawn to the colonial roots of distinctions between plants classified as weeds, crops, and “invasive” species. 

So how did citizen science figure in this discussion? I decided to take the students to different gardens on campus to map what kinds of plants were cultivated in each using iNaturalist. iNaturalist was a master’s degree project created by Ken-ichi Ueda, Nate Agrin, and Jessica Kline at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information in 2008. It later became a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Using the app, students identified different plants, their geographical distribution, and their classification as a native or introduced species. 

In preparation for our exercise, we became familiar with the features of the app before venturing out of the classroom. I gave them a list of questions to think through as they made a list of plants across different gardens on campus. These questions focused on how weeds are defined, how they tell a story about ecological transformation and the limits of human control of the environment, and the role that weeds have played in discourses of settler colonialism and the meanings that people associate with weeds beyond extractive plantation economies.

Sitting under a magnolia tree in one of the campus gardens, we went through the list of plants that we had mapped that day. iNaturalist creates maps of geographical distribution for the plant to show its origins, its scientific classification, and its categorization as native, crop, or introduced species. Students discussed how arbitrary certain classifications of plants as weeds were and how these classifications were always made in dichotomous relationships with plants classified as crops. Many students observed that weeds like dandelions and rabbit-foot clover thrived across campus despite campus gardeners’ intensive efforts to eliminate them. Some students discussed how weeds like dandelions were considered a delicacy in their homes and how plant classifications as weeds often overlooked the role of plants in local foodways. Many others reflected on how plants that were considered invasive like crown vetch could also be used for erosion control and soil stabilization in flood impacted regions. Furthermore, students were intrigued by the way that these patches of wilderness remained amid manicured garden spaces across campus, thus pointing to the limits of human management of non-human life.

In critically engaging with iNaturalist, students were able to observe the epistemic enclosures that scientific taxonomies created. They agreed that while these technologies enabled them to identify plants and made them feel a sense of familiarity with their lived worlds, these technologies also validated dominant narratives about plants as either crops or invasive species. According to one student who reminisced about a family recipe that used dandelions in a stew, conventional plant taxonomies implied that weeds were insignificant and therefore overlooked the everyday relationships and meanings that people imbued them with. In reflecting on the limits of plant taxonomies and their apparent colonial histories, we discussed how colonial plantations did not make room for the meanings that people attributed to more-than-human actors like plants. In doing so, we were able to connect the extractive logics of the colonial plantation to the boundaries created by scientific classification. 

Citizen science projects allow us to interrogate what Banu Subramaniam calls “a botanical colonization” (2024, 14) to emphasize the colonial legacies of plant taxonomy. By using iNaturalist and engaging in conversations with peers, students were able to point out how scientific objectivity is often a more complex process that can be brought into view through ethnographic research. This allowed students to engage experientially with scientific knowledge production but also to question the boundaries of scientific classification. Throughout the course, we kept coming back to this exercise as we discussed what it meant to understand the experience of climate change through citizen science projects. 

Conclusion

Having students wander campus, cell phones in hand, using AI-powered apps to record the surrounding flora and fauna serves a number of pedagogical ends. In the age of generative AI, a trip outside of the classroom to use tools with which they are likely unfamiliar gives students a memorable experience. One hopes that this might even take them out of a loop of using ChatGPT to read and then write about course materials. Reflecting on our experiences, there are three further points that we would share with instructors considering incorporating naturalist tools in anthropology classrooms. 

First, doing so can invite productive conversations with students about ethnographic methods. Good ethnography is improvisational, following the flow of social life to reinvent what “participation” might mean in any given circumstances. Could it be that methods from the natural sciences can be done in the style of ethnography? Our experiences suggest that they can. We found students to be more than capable of reflecting on the routine practices that comprise naturalist observation and questioning the forms of common sense that they implied.

Second, in keeping with an ethnographic approach, incorporating these methods offers the opportunity to come into new kinds of relation with people who have a differently situated engagement with the environment. In particular, this is an excellent opportunity to make linkages with environmental scientists on campus and perhaps even connect with existing citizen science projects. Indeed, it was only through organizing this exercise that Damien learned about the Princeton Better for Birds Project. Further collaboration would have the potential to be enriching for students in anthropology and the natural sciences alike.

Third, engaging with citizen science projects allowed for conversations about objectivity in the natural sciences. In Nimisha’s class, students were able to consider the power dynamics shaping the construction of scientific taxonomies. By thinking about the social implications of scientific knowledge, students were able to think more reflexively about scientific practices.