"Everyone has spiders in their yard"

Dr. Michelle Thompson is the Director of Conservation Biology at the San Diego Natural History Museum. She leads the museum’s Healthy Canyons Initiative, which aims to fill gaps in data on plant and animal life in San Diego's canyons, as well as inform conservation efforts of those canyon ecosystems. The Healthy Canyons Initiative is also a community science project—it recruits students, families, and thousands of other San Diego County residents as data collectors.

“…people don't conserve what they don't know, what they don't value, parts of their life that they don't participate in…”

How did the Healthy Canyons Initiative get started? When did the museum become interested in studying the canyons? 

This really started in the '80s, when San Diego became more and more urbanized and built up. We have a pretty unique topography in San Diego—we have a bunch of flat mesas and steep canyon areas. And it was easier to build on the mesas and harder to build in the canyons. So what is left, in urban San Diego, are these canyons. They’re islands of green spaces, these little fragments surrounded by houses and other urban areas.

As that was happening in the '80s, a scientist by the name of Michael Soulé (who's from the Southern California area) saw these islands and thought, "Wow, what's going on with the plants and animals? Do bigger island fragments have more animals or less animals?," asking ecology questions that people ask on regular islands and putting it into the framework of urban canyons in San Diego.

So he really started the research. He and a group of students and biologists were working on birds and mammals, mainly, and they predicted some birds and mammals will do better and some will do worse over time. That's where it all started. 

Was he with the San Diego Natural History Museum?

No, but he had been coming since he was a kid. He had taught for some UC schools and many other universities. So, loose affiliation, but not working for the museum at that time.

But [Dr. Soulé’s research] really got this sort of work started. He went on to become one of the main founders of conservation biology as a discipline, institutionalizing it as a formal discipline in science. A lot of what I'm doing now as the Director of Conservation Biology, and what I'm doing in the Healthy Canyons Initiative, all started from concepts in San Diego, which I think is really neat. Now, decades later, we get to look back and see—have things changed? Did those predictions hold up? And how do we get people involved in this nature-fragment-based research [right outside] their doors?

Before I came to the museum, there was a pilot study that ran up against the pandemic. And, like many different studies that are supposed to involve the community, they met with a bunch of challenges. But still made some great progress in Two Canyons.

I came into the museum in—gosh, it's been three and a half years now. And right away it seemed like a great project, exactly the type of thing that I thought my Conservation Biology department should be doing. And I've been working on the initiative ever since.

Were they working with community scientists from the beginning?

Well, I don't have a lot of documentation on if [Dr. Soulé’s team] specifically involved a lot of community scientists. I know a lot of students were involved.

I will say that since the museum has formally started their Healthy Canyons initiative, the community part has always been really important from the start. We're a museum. We're very public-facing. A big goal is to get people involved.

When did the formal program start? 

The most formal part of the Healthy Canyons program started around 2020. Although some of our researchers have been working in canyons in other ways over time.

I wasn't working at the museum, but what I'm told by the project manager at the time was that people were really excited. It just took a lot of extra work to make sure things were getting done safely [during the pandemic], with all the policies that were in place at the time.

I want to ask: Why community science? I know you're a museum, so bringing the public in is already a part of your DNA. But for academics who are maybe less familiar with it, what's your pitch?

Well, as a conservation biologist, I think people don't conserve what they don't know, what they don't value, parts of their life that they don't participate in, or feel affect or benefit them every day. And so, for me, that's the biggest reason. And also, I just think science is for everyone.

I see people's faces light up when they get to participate, specifically for urban biodiversity [research]. This is the nature that's outside of people's houses. They should feel like they can interact with it if they want to, and know how to interact with it. What we find is people don't.

We're hauling a bunch of equipment into the canyons, like traps for animals and temperature data loggers, and people are like, "Oh, what are you doing?" We explain to them. We ask, "Have you ever walked in this canyon?" They're like, "Oh, no, I don't really know that much about it, but I live in this neighborhood." And we're like, "Oh, well, the trails are open to you." And some people don't realize that, which I find extremely surprising. 

I mean, there's many different barriers. People don't have time and things like that. Those informal conversations have also kind of lit a fire under us to try and get out there and get people connected to their local green spaces.

“We [can’t] just stroll up to someone's house and sample without their knowledge… And everyone has spiderwebs in their yard.”

But are there concerns about data quality when it comes from community members, people who aren't trained like you guys are?

Yeah, I think there is. We offer sort of a menu of different ways people can interact because not everyone can spend a ton of extra hours training to learn a specific technique.

So for example, iNaturalist, which is an app that anyone can use when they're walking around to take photos of plants or animals and it posts online. There's an AI model that can give people a guess to what they're looking at. And then researchers like us will go online and curate them. Like, "Oh, that's actually this species."

That's one way to interact, and also help improve quality of data, while giving people (who might not have a bunch of extra time to train and come out with you to do more structured surveys) support and learning.

Another option we have is being trained and coming out with us. I mean, we're all a team together. Like any team, you're looking out for each other and making sure the data's collected.

Then you have the type of community science projects where we train people, and then we send them off with equipment and tell them to get the data back to us. Those projects are, of course, the most important to train and design properly, so that it's easy for people. We're not sending them off to a lab. We're usually sending them with a little kit to collect something and send it back to us. And actually, people pick up on things quite easily.

What do you do with this data once it's collected? Is it available on a public database, or do you use it for your research? What does the rest of the life cycle look like?

It's all of the above. There are different projects, and data is packaged as the Healthy Canyons Initiative Project right away for anyone. We also collect data, curate it, make sure it's clean and analyze it, and put it up on our resources webpage.

We have a bunch of other resource webpages like Plant Atlas. The curator of botany will make sure it's on his webpage too, because people access things in different ways, right? Even if it's the same information, we try to get it out there as much as possible.

We regularly communicate to all of our community science project members, and we make sure that they get reports. Like, “Here's a preliminary report, here's an updated report, here's your personalized report of exactly what you collected, versus the whole of the project.”

Of course, we're still collecting data right now, but everything is going to go up on the website, and out in scientific publications. Also presentations, and more publicly accessible and digestible infographics, and things like that.

But the community science data, it's really not separate in many ways. Sometimes it's a specific project, but that's a full life cycle of a scientific project. One example of that is us collecting eDNA.

People, plants, and animals that have DNA—they're shedding feathers or fur or skin cells or things like that [which becomes environmental DNA, or eDNA]. And in this case, we were collecting spiderwebs, because it's sticky so it might collect the eDNA very well. That was a whole project for us to understand: What can these spiderwebs tell us about what's in these canyons? Can we say something about what's in canyons, versus what's in people's yards right next to canyons? Are they extensions of these green spaces? Are there different things that we're picking up in either?

And so that was a whole scientific study, and the community participated in the whole thing. It wasn't something separate or, like, an add-on.

We only have so many eyes, and so much time to be out in the canyons, and we pick up a lot of extra species just by community members happening to be there at the right time [to see] a snake go by. We don't always get the secretive species, even with [conducting] standardized surveys over and over again. So the community really helps to build that information.

How does the eDNA found in canyons differ from other urban areas? What did you find?

Well, we're still analyzing the data.

We gave a preliminary list where we had to pick just a couple species to test. So, what we found is mostly insects (which you would expect because spiderwebs are built to trap insects for the spiders). But we're also picking up some birds and mammals. Now, some of the difficulty we're having is we need a local reference library of genetic data for us to compare to. Right now we're blasting it against these large global databases. Sometimes we can't get very specific. It'll be like, “canine mammal,” you know what I mean? We're pretty sure we can get it more localized, but if you can imagine all the species in San Diego, it's taking time to build that reference database.

That's all to say, we learned that we can pick up many different things. It looks like there's probably a difference between yards and canyons in some aspects, but there's overlap as well. We're now looking to find ways to build that reference database for future monitoring and hopefully to expand the community project. Because a lot of the members came back to us and said, "Hey, we wanna do this more."

We collaborate with people up in Los Angeles. There was an undergraduate presenting at a conference their honors thesis in trying this [collecting spiderwebs to harvest eDNA] out. Some people in my department were talking with the undergraduate student and were like, "Oh my gosh, I think the community could do this.” It ended up being a collaboration between Los Angeles and us and the community. The fact that it was from an undergrad project, I think is really exciting. A student really gave us the idea for this whole thing. 

No other study had tried spiderwebs as this collector before?

There's a handful of research out there. We found, at the time we were starting this, about seven-ish papers published. I mean, I'm sure there are more. But it hadn't been used very much at all. 

What made people think of turning to the community for it in the first place?

We're interested in a couple different [settings]—people's yards and the canyons. And of course, it's people's property. It's people's homes. We don't have the [authority] to just stroll up to someone's house and sample without their knowledge. And, of course, we would want them to be involved as much as possible. 

And we're doing a similar project with birds, but with recorders, where community members host their own little recorder in their yard (and we have them in the canyons). You can pick up birdsong and figure out what's there. We thought we could replicate that with spiderwebs. And everyone has spiderwebs in their yard.

“When they come out with us, it just opens up a door… ‘Oh, I can do this.’”

Do you find people are more often hesitant to interact with nature? Or is it more like they go overboard and don't interact with it safely, maybe accidentally destroying habitats?

It's the former. I feel like people are nervous. We get questions like, "What are the trails like? Are things gonna scratch up against my leg?" Anything from people just not being used to nature, to general safety as well. “How safe are the trails?” Or, “Where do I start? Or is there a map?”

All across the board, it's just that people don't have the information to interact with these spaces and, therefore, feel uncomfortable to do so. When they come out with us, it just opens up a door, I think. Like, "Oh, I can do this."

That's so interesting. You come across the advice online all the time, or at least I do, that's like, "Go touch grass." But people don't even know how to approach that.

So you're kinda giving them a structure, like, “Here's how you touch grass, scientifically.”

Yes.

What is the way that most people interact with the program? Is it through iNaturalist, or is it through your more hands-on programs?

It's spread all over, but by the numbers, the most people that interact with this program is probably through iNaturalist. People all across San Diego can contribute one observation or 100 observations. The other thing we do are BioBlitzes, and we get a number of people. For example, there's a Border BioBlitz, which celebrates areas along the border, or City Nature Challenge, which celebrates cities. Not all cities, but many cities participate in that. 

Sometimes we'll run guided hikes, but we call it a BioBlitz, so everyone's taking pictures of different things and recording. That is another way that we get a lot of people involved. Then we do have a number of people that are involved in the heavier-trained aspect of it, too. Of course less, because not everyone could come out once a week with the botany team to document plants or not everyone has time on the weekend. Sometimes, we have events to be trained in community science.

Do you lead any of the hikes and the BioBlitzes?

Yes, we do as a team, because we usually split up into groups. There'll be me and someone else leading one group, and another one of my colleagues leading another group. We also team up with our Canyoneers, which is a group that leads hikes throughout San Diego. They've been active for about 50 years, and they’re volunteers associated with the Nat that lead hikes around the community. We always try and invite them in since they do this full time as well. Maybe not the actual science part of it, but they're leading groups around all the time. 

What's it like being out there with the community volunteers? You said there were a lot of students. What other types of people show up? Families? 

It's a big mix of people. Families will show up, and that's always fun. I've definitely had the comment from family members, parents, that they really appreciate the opportunity to learn with their kids, because they're learning, too.

They've commented that the interaction and the conversation between them and their own kids in the learning process is actually really rewarding, and they've learned more from their kids. Because sometimes their kids will be like, "Oh, I learned in biology class…," and it starts a whole conversation within that family.

We do get a lot of students involved. We try to work with teachers. We try to blast the information out as far and wide as possible. Some curious neighbors show up, which of course we love. You know, sometimes they'll just see a big group of us out there and be like, "Hey, what are you doing?” And we'll just be like, "If you have nothing else planned today, come learn about your local nature."

Do you get much feedback from the people who just wander in?

So far it's all been positive, and they would like more and more support. We're trying to build more and more resources. Most people have iPhones, and so they can use iNaturalist. But not everyone necessarily has an iPhone, or they don't want their kids to have phones, and so we're trying to find other ways to build resources.

And so mostly the feedback is, like, “Can you do more of this?” Or, you know, “How can we know about these sorts of events?” And also, we get a lot of questions after these sorts of things about, “If my kids want to get involved at a later time, like at high school or college, in an internship, in this sort of career, how do I direct them towards that?”

Those are a lot of the questions that I get, which I think is exciting. If you're walking around on a hike and it makes you wanna support your child in pursuing a biology career, then that's always fun. 

Definitely.

“…replicating the collaboration between science institutions and community institutions would be the most successful…”

I've been covering the way that the federal research system has been attacked, and hit hard by funding cuts. And I'm looking at community science programs as examples of ways that data collection can maybe be crowdsourced. 

I wanted to get your take on how reproducible your program is to other institutions—other natural history museums, or maybe some community-based science clubs. How feasible do you think that is, and do you have any advice?

People could probably find it fairly easy to replicate a lot of these different projects. There's a lot of lessons learned too, like, “We should have done it this way,” or, “We're really glad we did this.”

I'm part of an alliance with other museums in California called the California Urban Nature Alliance, and so we share best practices with the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County and Cal Academy up in San Francisco. There are a lot of those conversations, because other museums do a ton of community science as well. It's been really useful to have other colleagues to share that information like, "Oh, we see that you're doing this. Maybe we could tweak it and replicate it."

A lot of times we have a strong connection with the community, but local community-based organizations that are rooted in the community for years and that's their whole purpose—we really try to work with them. Because on any funding cycle, or project cycle, your time is usually limited, and it could take years to build trust and relationship with community members. Also [community groups] understand their needs really well. Instead of us dropping into wherever hoping we're gonna get enough feedback from community members in a couple days to design a project, we really try and work with those community-based organizations. And hopefully then those organizations don't have to think about the science part of it as much. They can really lean into and spend their time on focusing on making sure the community's getting what they need.

That collaboration, I think, has been really important. So maybe groups of organizations replicating the collaboration between science institutions and community institutions would be the most successful, not replicating exactly what the museum is doing.

How did those collaborations come about, and what organizations are you working with? 

We work with a ton, so I don't wanna call out any specific one. But [they happened] over time.

We're either in some sort of meeting about conservation in San Diego, or nature. San Diego's a small world, you meet people over time, and slowly you build those relationships. Like, "Oh, I see your organization is interested in this. Let's have lunch. Let's chat. Maybe we have some similar goals." 

I mean, our museum is old, 1874, and people before me have built relationships, and so that's been really useful. They'll send me an email, and then I can connect with other organizations and convene meetings and invite a whole bunch of different organizations in.

I run a symposium called State of Biodiversity Symposium, and that's a huge thing where we try and bring the public in and a whole bunch of other organizations, whether they're science-based, community-based, environmental-based, government-based, as a networking spot where you can talk about some of those sorts of connections.

That's been really helpful. But yeah, making the connections, I think, is the important thing.

If the California Urban Nature Alliance is [sharing] best practices and lessons learned, do you know of any public-facing resources to come out of that?

It's a new thing that we're starting up, and so we've had a couple meetings to establish what our mission is, what our values are, how often we chat with each other, and how formal or informal it is. We do have some information on our webpage at San Diego Natural History Museum, and we're looking to put out some additional materials later this year. 

Is there anything I missed? Anything else you wanna shout out?

For whoever wants to get involved, our information's on the [Community Science] webpage. There's an email there. Join the iNat project. Honestly, those iNat observations help us a ton as scientists, but also to give information back to the community.