Practicing Collaborative Biodiversity Research with High Schools to Benefit Both Education and Invasive Species Monitoring

We discuss here the challenges of designing research projects involving people from different backgrounds whose primary purpose is not necessarily to generate academic outputs, based on our experience in coordinating a community-based biodiversity monitoring project for ants. Local ant faunal research is active in Japan, and there is an accumulation of robust identification tools, but several barriers exist to developing sustainable models for citizen participation. For example, there are gaps between the planners, often researchers at the top of the power hierarchy, and participants, citizen scientists with varying levels of experience, regarding their motivation, willingness to participate, and sense of purpose. In this example involving collaboration with local high schools, there were large discrepancies in survey cost, data accuracy, and expected results between researchers who mainly wanted to discover new scientific findings and schools who mainly prioritized educational value of activities. To address these issues, we attempted a new form of networking by having each participating organization independently design and implement their project. We did this by sharing ant survey packages, which enabled unified and compact analyses implementing the Time-Unit Sampling method. By sharing the same survey protocols, we ensured high data quality by sharing the specimens themselves, rather than the data. This framework helped us demonstrate a good example of win-win project collaboration that allowed the participating schools to conduct their projects autonomously while specimens collected by students could be utilized for scientific research. Thus, this framework benefited both high school education and local biodiversity monitoring research that informs the distribution status and control of invasive ant species.