Whole Community Marine Science Colombia

Achieving sustainable coral reef ecosystems in Colombia depends on more monitoring and research. All Colombians need to be aware of their impact to conserve and protect coral reefs, even if they reside in the mountains of Bogotá and will never visit a reef in person. Our “whole community science” approach integrates science, local knowledge of fishermen and other community members, and creates curriculum for secondary schools to promote education and awareness of impact. Our platform engages marine scientists using buoys that send ocean temperature data 24/7 to a publicly available website, ROVs creating photo mosaics and transects of the reef, and other relevant data. Local knowledge is obtained by the platform with inputs of quantitative and qualitative data of fish and lobster. Finally, teachers and students access the data and curriculum materials for educational outreach. Conservation of ocean ecosystems involves authentic scientific interactions between scientists, local community, and students.

Through a “Whole Community Science” approach, our field to classroom experience monitors, researches and communicates impacts on coral reefs in San Andres and Providencia Islands in Colombia. Our project includes marine scientists, local fishermen and other sources of local knowledge, and students in secondary level classrooms. There often is a separation between scientists and the local community or the student learning experience in school. Our project aims to bridge that gap by implementing a project that integrates the community in authentic science beyond just citizen science projects that allow locals to collect and share data. Instead they are involved in the entire process determining the direction of the research. Colombia has 3,208 km of coastline along both the Pacific and Caribbean. Despite this, many students will never formally study their Colombian marine backyard or even visit it in person. One of the greatest barriers for inclusion of marine science is curriculum time. Our curriculum uses marine science lessons to teach core concepts in biology, chemistry and physics, so it is more likely students will study their coastal communities in Colombia. We feature Colombian marine scientists to improve science identity in LatinX students not only in Colombia, but any Hispanic community.

We design marine science research projects that include the interests of the local community and secondary education. To help us understand cause-and-effect of increasing temperatures on Colombian marine environments, buoys transmit ocean temperature to servers that make real time data available and survey imagery collected with ROVs. The scientific process must include local knowledge, a wealth of natural history and long-term data. Our platform enables the community to enter data regarding diversity, size, and abundance of fish and lobster with photo verification. It also allows them to share potential research questions and hypotheses to guide the direction of future research. All of this data will be visible to the public on the platform and will include visualizations and graphs of relationships, so the community can see the impact of factors affecting coral reefs and its organisms. Our platform allows people to easily see the long-term changes and impacts on reefs, that otherwise they may not feel a direct connection. Finally, we create curriculum that uses the research to teach students about their Colombian coral reefs. By exposing students to marine science education in their core science classes, we increase awareness and potential for change in human behavior that affects reefs.

There are multiple audiences that are impacted by this solution and at different scales.

Coastal communities in Colombia, especially San Andres and Providencia Islands are not areas of great wealth. In particular San Andres and Providencia are relatively low income and currently are struggling to rebound from the hurricane that destroyed the two islands and their coastal ecosystems in November 2020. We work directly with the local community and fishermen, which are not a part of the commercial industry. The older generation also do not regard themselves as Colombian but as San Andreans, an independent islander so to speak. On each field trip we always spend time talking with the local fishermen to hear their stories about changes with the environment and their most recent concerns about an industry that is their livelihood to support their families. These islands have an expansive coral reef system and it is essential to protect their coastal community that is often overlooked and abused by tourism and commercial fishing industries.

We also work with Colombian marine scientists. We help support their desire for marine science research in the coastal communities of Colombia including San Andres and Providencia Islands. They are able to continue their interests and publish their results to communicate their findings with other marine scientists. We try to showcase their research and share it with other audiences to promote Latinos in marine science research and STEM in general. 

Our curriculum is available in Spanish and English and features Colombian marine scientists. We hope to expose more students not only those in Colombia, but also those in the United States with a large Latino population. We hope to show more representation in science, to increase the science identity of Latino students. All of our curriculum resources are available free, so that there is no limitation to who can access.

The “smart buoys” from Aqua Link monitor changes in sea temperature at the surface and at 15m depth. They are part of a larger worldwide system of monitor buoys for climate change that also shares visual data such as photo mosaics and transects. Our project in San Andres and Providencia engages local fishermen with an app that collects qualitative and quantitative data describing the abundance, diversity, and size of fish during their regular fishing trips. Our large open source long-term data set is accessible by any person engaging in scientific research, but also used to educate students through our curriculum.

We are beyond the concept stage, as we have already begun several aspects of the project. We currently have obtained the buoys and have been engaging in research for several years on the islands. We also have had conversations with local fishermen to learn more about the natural history of the organisms, but also to understand their personal curiosities about their marine environment. From research that has been previously done in the coastal communities of Colombia, we have now published curriculum in academic journals and piloted in school communities. The full field to classroom experience has components that are in the prototype phase such as the app to help local fishermen collect and share their data, but other components that are in the pilot stage such as the curriculum that we use with students.

Similar to the restaurant dining experience of farm to table, this project is a field to classroom experience. We engage with local knowledge such as fisherman, scientists and conservationists, and students in the classroom. It may seem similar to a Citizen Science Project, but it is much more than people collecting data. We engage with different members of the community because we, all, are natural scientists and we all engage and do science every day! It truly is a whole community science approach.

Our science is large scale through the use of six smart buoys that measure real-time ocean data that is available on the web. We monitor the reefs providing visual imagery to show the conditions of the reefs as the ocean temperatures change. The direction of the scientific research is driven by the inquiries, inferences, predictions, and observations of the local community. The fishermen have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and interaction with the marine environment that determines the research we pursued. We finish the loop by creating curriculum that engages students in a manner to highlight the work of Latinos to improve the science identity of Latino students in Colombia and the United States. Students also engage in authentic science using the data from the research. They also are able to contribute their own ideas in the understanding of the research of marine coastal communities. Unlike other marine curriculum, ours is not for an elective science course, but integrates into a biology, chemistry, or physics course.

Within the first year we will have 3-4 marine scientists and 1 data scientist engaged in the research, 10-20 local fishermen using the app, and several schools in Bogotá and Cartagena in Colombia using the curriculum, as well as several in schools. The impact is low for the first year, as we will be piloting and assessing the usability and feasibility of the different components of the project. 

With increased funding after year 1, we will include not only the core 3-4 marine scientists and 1 data scientist working on the scientific research but also 6- 12 volunteers each year assisting through scuba diving ecotourism. We also will launch the app and through community events on San Andres and Providencia Island engage more local fishermen, school children, and others that may be able to contribute to the data collected in the app. Our target is at least 50 active participants regularly interacting with the app. For the curriculum, we will present our curriculum and its improvements of science identity to several conferences that include NSTA, CAST, TAEE, and NMEA. Through these presentations we anticipate 20 teachers using the curriculum with the potential for more than 1500 students in the USA using the curriculum. We also will continue to promote within Colombia and will expand to more than 10 schools in Cartagena, Cali, and Bogotá. We expect this will continue to increase each year as we continue to publish the scientific research, but also the educational and learning research.

Since we have both science and education research backgrounds, we are measuring our impacts from several different perspectives. In the first year, we will be measuring the usability and feasibility of prototypes of the platform and app. We will also measure in the first year the usability and feasibility of the curriculum with at least 12 of the 16 modules.

After the first year, we intend to measure the attitudes of the local community that engages with the platform and app to understand their perceptions of themselves as contributors to the scientific process and their science identity. With our curriculum we also measure science identity and self-efficacy for science among students, with a focus on the intersections of race and gender. We have several diagnostics that we currently use to understand students’ attitudes for science. We will further relate the changes of attitudes for science identity and self-efficacy with changes in academic grades to see the impacts of perception of identity on academic performance. 

In addition to the above data, we will continuously track the number of users and the level of engagement with the platform and the app for both the local knowledge component and the educational curriculum component.

Currently we have 5 part time staff contributing to the project that include marine scientists, a data scientist, and curriculum writers.  

The lead of this project is both an oceanographer and a science education researcher. Thus, this project is truly planned from a dual perspective of science and education, not a science project with an outreach component. Dr Stephanie Toro, has more than a decade of marine science research and has been writing curriculum and teaching in secondary science classrooms for more than 18 years. She has been working on this project for the last three years and has begun publishing the curriculum in academic journals. Our lead data collection manager and dive instructor has more than 2 decades of diving experience as a dive instructor. He is one of the main instructors for the Colombian police, military, search and rescue, and scientific divers. He has worked on many projects with SENA including documentaries and communication of marine science to the everyday person. We also have a data scientist with experience and the passion to drive social and educational impact by making data more relatable and understandable to the typical person. He has years of experience in developing structures that creates visualizations of data to be interpreted by a general audience. We also have several others that help with our science and curriculum writing. In particular one of our marine scientists is a PhD student with a passion for writing curriculum and speaking with young audiences. She loves to share her experience to inspire young Latinas to pursue STEM. 

With the exception of Dr Stephanie Toro, all members of the team are Colombian. When possible, we try to include Colombianas to have representation of Latinas in STEM. Given that one of the primary goals is to highlight the marine science of Latinos to expose students to diverse representations in science, we are sensitive to building diverse, equitable, and inclusive teams. We want for all students to engage with the curriculum and potentially see “themselves” in the scientists that are featured. 

We also do not operate based on a hierarchy of prestige or age. For example, one of our leading science contributors is a PhD student that discovered a new species of octocoral while she was completing her masters. She is dedicated to marine science, but more importantly engaging young students especially Latinas in STEM. 

We also value different perspectives, not just those from an academic perspective. Therefore, we feel it is essential to engage the local community including fishermen, as well as students. Through different perspectives we can better engage in science that is a whole community approach. It will not only answer questions that academics are interested but pursue the questions that are important to those that live in the environments and depend on the organisms for their livelihood. Students are often uninhibited and natural curious investigators, thus it is important to include them in the process as well. 

We are applying to Solve because we have been able to operate on a small scale. We have obtained the buoys through Aqua Link and the ROV from National Geographic. We have already published in academic journals three of the modules. We continue to implement annual field monitoring of the coral reefs. We are now at the point that we are ready to scale the project larger. In order to do this we need technological support to design and develop a platform and an app to engage the local community, as well as teachers and students. We do not have any expertise in this area and do not know the correct questions or options that are even available. We will need mentoring from others that have more knowledge of how to develop technology for these purposes. We also need financial support. While we have goals to be sustainable in the long-term, the short-term costs are well beyond our budget. We do not have the expertise to seek funds or donors. 

With mentorship and support to develop the technological aspects of our project and to gain the funds to do so, we will be able to develop a project that has the potential to raise awareness of coral reefs and the impacts that we all have on reefs and coastal communities, even if we live far away. We also hope to inspire more Latino students to pursue STEM by featuring Colombian marine scientists. 

For our project the most necessary need relates to financial and public relations. We need help to find investors and donors that will be willing to support this project if we are unable to get the necessary grant money. As a nonprofit, loans are not of interest to us. The second greatest area of need will be help with the creation of the platform and app. We have the personnel for the science, curriculum writing, and data science collection, management, and visualization, but we do not have a technology person that is capable of creating the actual app or platform itself. We would need support in this area to help us determine how to advertise and communicate our needs to a potential individual or company that would need to be hired to do the work for us. Given that we have no expertise in this area, it will be difficult for us to even know our options or have the correct terminology to communicate our desires.

At this time we would be most interested in finding a partner that is capable of supporting the technology aspects of developing a platform and app for us. The platform would be a website that allows for three different purposes. First a section that allows anyone to access the real-time data from the buoys measuring ocean temperature, but also other data including the visual imagery of the reefs. This includes any graphs and other visualizations created by our data scientist showing relationships of the data. The second purpose is a section that allows local community members to insert their qualitative and quantitative data regarding fish and lobster, as well as potential research questions and predictions/inferences. This would also be linked to an app for ease of data collection. The final purpose is to allow teachers and students access to all of the curriculum modules with the necessary audio and visual materials and needed data sets. 

Our project focuses on building sustainable coastal communities in Colombia through education of marine science in schools. We want to involve local knowledge and students in authentic scientific research. It bridges the gap of scientific research between scientists and the general public. By increasing awareness of the conditions of the reef, their threats, and potential for positive impacts through science curriculum that engages students to take action to protect coral reefs in Colombia. Our curriculum is free to all and available in both Spanish and English. It features Colombian marine scientists to show diversity in STEM with the goal to increase science identity from students using the curriculum, especially Latinos in Colombia and the United States. The curriculum aligns with concepts of biology, chemistry, and physics using Colombian marine science examples. It also engages in level 3 and level 4 of science inquiry, so that students are performing authentic science inspired by high self-efficacy through the use of Latino role models.  

The additional funding of $150,000 would provide the needed funding to fully develop the platform and the associated app that would engage the local community and the general public worldwide to see the actual changes happening to the reefs based on changes in temperature and other impacts such as tourism, industry, and overfishing. We would also be able to complete the full curriculum which contains 16 modules for biology, chemistry, physics, and general science inquiry. 

Not only do we aim to highlight the work of Latino marine scientists in our research and curriculum, but we are especially interested in emphasizing that of Latinas. Currently we feature the work of Diana Vergara, one of our scientists and curriculum writers, who identified a new species of octocoral during her graduate studies. Not only are we trying to elevate female researchers, but we hope by sharing their stories and creating curriculum from their data, younger females will have an increase in science identity and see themselves and potential for a career in STEM. This intersection of race and gender is continuously a lacking group of representation in STEM with the lack of well publicized Latina role models. Our curriculum is available in Spanish and English, so we target not only students and schools in Colombia, but also present our curriculum at many of the leading science education conferences such as NSTA in the USA. WE want to improve science identity and self-efficacy in science not just in Colombia, but also in Latino populations in the USA. 

We want to involve local knowledge and students in authentic scientific research. It bridges the gap of scientific research between scientists and the general public. Local communities often contain a wealth of knowledge that is not accessed in science. A single fisherman in San Andres may have six to seven decades of observational qualitative and quantitative data, establishing a natural history of many of the essential fisheries in the areas. Our platform and its associated app will tap into this local knowledge. We will be able to use the inputs of diversity, abundance, and size of different species of fish and lobster to gain an understanding of the changes related to the changes of temperature measured by our buoys and the conditions of the reef through the photo mosaics. Local community members can input data verified by photos, as well as share theirobservations, inferences, and questions to direct future research. 

The additional funding of $100,000 would provide the needed funding to fully develop the platform and the associated app that would engage the local community and the general public worldwide to see the actual changes happening to the reefs based on changes in temperature and other impacts such as tourism, industry, and overfishing. We would also be able to complete the full curriculum which contains 16 modules for biology, chemistry, physics, and general science inquiry, which promotes this knowledge on a country level to have a greater impact. 

With access to data and increased awareness, social change can happen. 

We want to involve local knowledge and students in coral reef research, known sinks for carbon. It bridges the gap of scientific research between scientists and the general public. Local communities often contain a wealth of knowledge that is not accessed in science. A single fisherman in San Andres may have six to seven decades of observational qualitative and quantitative data, establishing a natural history of many of the essential fisheries in the areas. Our platform and its associated app will tap into this local knowledge. We will be able to use the inputs of diversity, abundance, and size of different species of fish and lobster to gain an understanding of the changes related to the changes of temperature measured by our buoys and the conditions of the reef through the photo mosaics. Local community members can input data verified by photos, as well as share their own observations, inferences, and questions to direct future research. 

The additional funding of $100,000 would provide the needed funding to fully develop the platform and the associated app that would engage the local community and the general public worldwide to see the actual changes happening to the reefs based on changes in temperature and other impacts such as tourism, industry, and overfishing. We would also be able to complete the full curriculum which contains 16 modules for biology, chemistry, physics, and general science inquiry, which promotes this knowledge on a country level to have a greater impact. 

We want to involve local knowledge and students in coral reef research, known sinks for carbon. It bridges the gap of scientific research between scientists and the general public. Local communities often contain a wealth of knowledge that is not accessed in science. A single fisherman in San Andres may have six to seven decades of observational qualitative and quantitative data, establishing a natural history of many of the essential fisheries in the areas. Our platform and its associated app will tap into this local knowledge. We will be able to use the inputs of diversity, abundance, and size of different species of fish and lobster to gain an understanding of the changes related to the changes of temperature measured by our buoys and the conditions of the reef through the photo mosaics. Local community members can input data verified by photos, as well as share their own observations, inferences, and questions to direct future research. 

The additional funding of $100,000 would provide the needed funding to fully develop the platform and the associated app that would engage the local community and the general public worldwide to see the actual changes happening to the reefs based on changes in temperature and other impacts such as tourism, industry, and overfishing. We would also be able to complete the full curriculum which contains 16 modules for biology, chemistry, physics, and general science inquiry, which promotes this knowledge on a country level to have a greater impact.