DISES: Using continent-wide participatory science to model the dynamic outcomes for humans and birds in a socio-environmental system

Bird feeding is the most common way that people intentionally attract wildlife near their homes, with over 57 million Americans involved in bird feeding. Bird feeders can impact the number and diversity of birds, increase the number of predators in an area, and increase disease transmission among birds. People can also be impacted through psychological responses to what they see at their feeders, which can influence their mental well-being.

This project addresses the question of how we can maximize the positive benefits of bird feeding for both birds and people. To do so, Project FeederWatch, a participatory science project with more than 10,000 volunteers across the United States who study birds at feeders, is being transformed, allowing participants to be involved in passive experiments and also to input information on their own psychological responses from their observations.

This research analyses how people’s responses are impacted by their beliefs about wildlife, motivations for feeding wildlife, and demographic characteristics such as gender, age, race, as well as physical or mental disabilities. The continent-wide scale of the collected data also allows for study of how these links between people and birds operate over seasons and from urban to rural areas.

The project also aims to understand and implement how to diversify bird feeding and participatory science projects, better engaging Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, and people with disabilities.

Worldwide, people intentionally modify landscapes and food sources to affect wildlife behavior and improve outcomes for themselves. These human-modified habitats constitute a growing portion of wildlife habitat in the Anthropocene; yet, these integrated socio-environmental systems have rarely been studied as such. The proposed work focuses on bird feeding and associated habitat management, arguably the most common form of intentional wildlife attraction, to understand socio-environmental links and emergent outcomes for bird populations and human mental well-being.

This project brings together social-ecological data collected weekly by participatory scientists across the continental U.S., feeder management experiments by participatory scientists, social science surveys, and laboratory experiments to test five hypotheses about the integrated links between human components and natural components of the socio-environmental system of bird feeding. The diverse ways in which humans impact birds and their natural enemies and the ways in which birds and their natural enemies influence humans, who then alter their behavior, are explored in this research.

These responses are integrated to understand overall effects of the human emotional and behavioral responses on mental well-being, effects of spatial and temporal variation in the abiotic environment, and emergent outcomes for bird populations and human mental well-being over time and space. This proposed transdisciplinary approach investigates the crucial contribution that participatory science can make to socio-environmental systems research, and brings together a team of scientists trained in social and ecological theories and experienced in convergent social-ecological science.

The work also engages more than 10,000 volunteers from across the U.S, including a disproportionately high number of women and strong participation of those with physical and mental disabilities, and focuses on improving inclusivity for ethno-racial groups that are currently underrepresented in birdwatching.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.