Searching for Community in Community Science

Calls for community science as a mechanism to strengthen the connection between the public and science are on the rise (Dwivedi et al., 2022). A Web of Science search for the keyword dimer “community science” in the topic field suggests that this sector of peer-reviewed literature is exploding, from just three papers published in 2015 to over 145 in 2022 (for the data wonks, that's an exponential curve with an R² = 0.9494). This year, 2022, also marks the start of the Community Science Exchange (communityscienceexchange.org/), a collaborative effort of six scholarly societies, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU), to elevate and celebrate community science in traditional (the peer-reviewed journal Community Science) and novel (web clearinghouse known as the Hub) ways. The Thriving Earth Exchange, one instantiation of community science within the geosciences supported by the AGU, now boasts over 100 projects. These waypoints on the road to making science a more inclusive space in both person and approach suggest we are becoming successful.

But, are we?

Cooper et al. (2021) assert that the apparent rise of community science may be more about renaming than actual community-level inclusion. As organizations from science museums to government agencies attempt to rebrand their public engagement in science programming, community science has become a politically acceptable moniker. But Cooper et al. (2021) point out that the roots of community science lie in social justice, and are deeply enmeshed in the environmental justice movement. In its original form, community science was an umbrella term stretching over participatory action research, community-based participatory research, community-engaged research, and community-owned and managed research. All of these approaches share the features of being from and for the local community. That is, a specific geographic place; often with a shared culture, heritage or lived experience; occasionally with a shared knowledge and skill set (i.e., a community of practice); and almost always underrepresented in and underserved by academic science. Under this definition, community science is an inherently local endeavor often mediated by a boundary spanner with one foot in the world of mainstream science and the other in community (Harris et al., 2021); where discovery science may take a back seat to actionable science; and where the work is co-created by community members and science professionals willing to share the thought, work, and credit space.

Of the 145 articles published in 2022 with “community science” somewhere in the topic fields, 62 were classifiable as primary research (i.e., generating new knowledge). Although all of these papers directly involved publics (i.e., people in general) in the work, only 10 involved specific named communities in co-created, co-produced ways, only three of those were situated within the natural sciences, and only one elevated community voice throughout the work. This paper: Reuniting the Three Sisters: collaborative science with Native growers to improve soil and community health (Kapayou et al., 2022) creates a braided knowledge path between the ancient tradition of corn, beans, and squash intercropping and a Western scientific analysis of soil health metrics given a common garden experiment. But this is the exception rather than the rule.

Why is the term community science so prevalent, if communities are largely obscured or simply not present within the work? A closer look at the literature reveals the naming shift called out by Cooper et al. (2021). Many of the primary research papers from the search above claiming community science might be more appropriately termed citizen science—the incorporation of publics into data collection efforts conceived, designed, analyzed and written up by scientists—and crowdsourcing—many individuals unknown to each other contributing information (e.g., photographs) to a common platform (e.g., Flickr) which can then be collected and used by anyone, including scientists (Figure 1).

Certainly citizen science and crowdsourced science has resulted in many advances in scientific discovery and particularly in the arena of impacts of a warming world on global biodiversity. The engagement of publics interested in a particular organism, place, or natural event, and who have the time, equipment and training to collect long-term data will continue to expand the reach of science. But these forms of public engagement may not address the growing needs of small, remote, disenfranchised, underserved, and/or marginalized communities faced with ever more serious and frequent impacts of a changing climate; and they may also fail to attract the widest diversity of participants (NASEM, 2018).

Rather than rebrand (sensu Cooper et al., 2021), or work to replace broad-scale forms of science engagement that are only loosely tied to local communities with bona fide community-based, owned and/or managed science, perhaps it is possible to embrace a goal of promoting all forms of public engagement in science that honestly and equitably promote individual participants as more than unpaid workers, even as society and mainstream science are also expanding to include and promote local science and ways of observing and understanding that don't emanate from the Academy but instead from those long on and of the land.

The journal Community Science is devoted to elevating and celebrating science performed by, with and for communities. And while we understand community to be inherently local, work that is cooperatively and collaboratively performed across larger spatial scales can also find a home here. Disciplinary breadth is unrestricted but should tie to some aspect of environmental health, function, and/or service provision. We publish articles ranging from commentaries to primary research that demonstrate long-term commitment to work together across the science-community boundary, and that include community voice as a major component of the work. Our current Special Collections, in “Climate Change, Global Air Quality, and Society” and “Equity in Co-Production” are emerging demonstrations of this approach.

In the coming year, we aim to dramatically increase the number of peer-reviewed primary research papers that are honestly in the sphere of community science. To date, the health sciences have taken the lead, but papers such as Kapayou et al. (2022) indicate that community science can be successful across a wide range of disciplines. To that end, we especially invite the geoscience and living natural resource disciplines to join us in braiding the path of science, and widening the world.