NOLS and Nutcrackers: The Motivations, Barriers, and Benefits Experienced by Outdoor Adventure Educators in the Context of a Citizen Science Project

Outdoor adventure education (OAE) organizations teach interpersonal and wilderness skills in outdoor settings and often include an explicit commitment to environmental learning. Because OAE organizations typically engage young adults in wilderness areas, citizen science projects in this context have the potential to generate data in remote locations and involve younger audiences in citizen science. The author engaged NOLS (formerly the National Outdoor Leadership School) in the Clark’s Nutcracker Project, a contributory citizen science project, to investigate the impacts of habitat decline on a high-elevation bird species in Wyoming. During the first season of the project, I used online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to identify the motivations, benefits, and barriers experienced by participating NOLS instructors and administrators. I found that instructors were most often motivated to participate in the project as a means to improve their environmental studies curriculum. Similarly, I found that instructors most often benefitted from the project’s capacity to serve as a teaching tool by providing a focus for curriculum objectives or fostering increased student awareness and student buy-in. Time limitations, study complexity, disappointment over absence data, and concerns about student data quality were the most often identified barriers to participation. In light of these findings, I recommend that citizen science projects within the OAE context should be very easy to implement and align well with existing curricula. For maximum impact, potential projects should focus on a readily visible study subject, be defined by a compelling need, and ideally connect to students’ lives beyond the backcountry.