Designing a Citizen Science Project: Sea Stars and Shorebirds at Acadia

A foggy morning at Frazer Point

At Frazer Point in Acadia National Park, Stephanie Letourneau and Zoe Brumbaugh watched, anxious and elated, as a quiet team of teenagers picked their way over the rocks in the fog at low tide to hunt for sea stars and other sea life. It was the payoff of a summer's work as ecology assistants in the Park Service's Scientists in Parks (SIP) program, based at Schoodic Institute. Among their projects on Acadia's 60 miles of coast: designing monitoring protocols for park visitors to carry out with Earthwatch Institute, which pairs volunteers with scientists worldwide.

Both knew citizen science. Brumbaugh, a new UC Davis graduate, had studied an invasive sea anemone in Tomales Bay, California, first reported by a citizen scientist. Letourneau, a master's student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, had worked with volunteers collecting water-quality data at Dickinson College's Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring. But neither had taken a project from idea to implementation.

Why the intertidal zone

The intertidal zone, underwater at high tide and exposed at low, is home to snails, seaweed and other life built for daily swings in moisture, temperature and salinity — and it faces invasive species, rising seas, warming water and ocean acidification. Long-term citizen science can catch slow shifts that would otherwise go unseen. "There can be subtle changes in the intertidal zone that we will never see unless we are paying attention in a systematic and sustained way," said Hannah Webber, Schoodic Institute's director of marine ecology, who supervised the pair.

They chose two understudied vital signs that volunteers could measure with little time or gear, from a list drawn up by former postdoctoral fellow Hannah Mittelstaedt through discussions among scientists, managers and people who work the shore: sea star abundance, and how coastal birds use the shore.

A blood star (Henricia sanguinolenta) found in Acadia National Park. NPS / Nina Foster.

• Sea stars are a keystone species, shaping the numbers of prey such as mussels. Former Second Century Stewardship fellow Melina Giakoumis reported a steep decline in North Atlantic sea stars since 1979, as they struggle with climate change and sea star wasting syndrome — which in 2013 devastated 20 species from Mexico to Alaska, killing in days or weeks with twisted arms, white lesions, deflation and disintegration. The West Coast shows signs of recovery; on the East Coast, sea stars are starting to waste away.
• Shorebirds in the United States have lost a third of their population in four decades, and with them part of a healthy shore.

The surveys also record other animals and algae, so researchers can study how sea stars relate to other species and judge the shore's health by its biodiversity. "The data from these citizen science surveys will help to shed light on these species' habitat preferences, current population sizes, and the impacts of disease in this region," said Giakoumis, who began monitoring Acadia's sea stars in 2021.

An eastern willet (Tringa semipalmata), a shorebird. NPS / Jalen Winstanley.

Designing for volunteers

Good citizen science balances scientific validity, a good experience for participants and relevance, teaching the process of science while producing new knowledge. The hard part, Brumbaugh said, was keeping the protocol easy for people with no research background while making sure their data stayed valuable. With researchers from Schoodic Institute and Acadia, the pair chose six groups of birds anyone could learn — easy species such as common eiders and black guillemots, plus one group of look-alike shorebirds that run along the water's edge — so the results would serve the people who'd use them.

Practice runs

First they tested the protocols on fellow Schoodic interns, including writer Nina Foster. At an overlook near Blueberry Hill, armed with data sheets, binoculars and laser rangefinders, the interns marked out a survey circle and, every minute for 10 minutes, logged which birds were there, how many, what they were doing and on what surface — scribbling frantically to keep up with birds overhead. A shoreline search for sea stars, algae and other creatures followed. Watching the successes and stumbles, the pair adjusted the procedures to yield accurate data without frustrating volunteers.

The real thing

Back at Frazer Point, the tired teens soon lit up, finding native and invasive crabs, many kinds of algae, young lobsters and periwinkles in a five-meter stretch of shore — but no sea stars in their plots. Then, as the group gathered, a sharp-eyed volunteer asked, "Is that a sea star?" It was a northern blood star, deep red, about three centimeters across, healthy. A few feet away another volunteer found a common sea star (Asterias rubens) with early wasting: one leg lost, its body going soft — a sobering reminder of the species' vulnerability.

Found outside the survey plots, the two couldn't go on the data sheets, so the teens practiced identifying, measuring, weighing and photographing them and logged them on iNaturalist for researchers worldwide. The next day's bird surveys went smoothly, and back in the classroom volunteers entered their data. "It's different seeing it in real life compared to seeing it on a PowerPoint slide," said an Earthwatch staff member. The volunteers came away with skills in species identification, rangefinders and data management, and a feel for a new ecosystem.

What it adds up to

In nine weeks, Brumbaugh and Letourneau built protocols that let volunteers track the vital signs of the Schoodic Peninsula's changing shore, feeding the research of Giakoumis, Webber and others and Acadia's management. "I hope that these protocols are used and refined for years to come," Letourneau said.

Sources

Based on "From Idea to Implementation: The Making of a Citizen Science Project," by Nina Foster, a 2024 Scientists in Parks intern at Acadia National Park, National Park Service; published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs credited to Schoodic Institute or by name only are not reproduced.