Photo: Mitiana Arbon
Tuaimoana Ruby is in her late teens and grew up near the Vaisigano river system in Samoa, a Pacific Island nation populated by over 280,000 people. The river system crisscrosses Upolu, one of the nation's two main islands, and Ruby has grown up to see it grow more polluted even in her short life. When the National University of Samoa (NUS), where she is pursuing a bachelor’s in science, offered her a chance to learn tools of citizen science to understand the Vaisigano, she jumped at it.
In July last year, Ruby and over 15 other students joined the citizen science project co-designed by NUS and supported by the Übersee-Museum Bremen, Germany. The three-day interdisciplinary workshop offered students a chance to interact with scientists, environmentalists, communicators and artists from Samoa, Germany and India.
Experts from both organisations, along with Indian environmentalist Kush Sethi and digital storyteller Abhay Adhikari, co-created workshops.
Ruby told Indian-American author Sohaila Abdulali, who was documenting the project, that she loves rivers and it has saddened her to see them in this state. Abdulali recollects that Ruby was unusual, “as most of the students don’t have much prior knowledge or interest in rivers.”
When you are surrounded by the ocean, rivers tend to get relegated to the margins.
“Freshwater resources are sometimes a bit overlooked, especially in Island environments, because they're surrounded by ocean and the ocean is so significant for daily life,” explains Michael Stiller, Head of the Department of Natural History at the Übersee-Museum Bremen. “But fresh water is something that no human can live without.”
The Übersee-Museum together with the NUS conceived the citizen science project to try to improve data collection by nurturing local Samoans’ relationships with the Vaisigano river system, which crisscrosses the 1,125 sq km island. The project comes at a juncture when freshwater ecosystems are facing multiple threats in Island nations.
Apart from climate change, the Pacific Island nations’ overreliance on fresh water for rain-fed agriculture puts economies and livelihoods at risk, a 2012 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report found. (Link: https://reliefweb.int/report/tuvalu/freshwater-under-threat-pacific-islands-report). Waterborne diseases, caused by poor sanitation treatment systems, are a leading factor of child deaths in the region.
“Few freshwater surveys have been conducted in Samoa and the full diversity of Samoan freshwater fauna is uncertain,” the Asian Development Bank noted in their report in 2019. “The discovery of new species is therefore possible during future surveys.” (Link: https://www.adb.org/ - documents)
Environmentalist Kush Sethi, who co-created the project with Michael Stiller and Diana Michler-Kozma, a biologist from the Übersee-Museum, says there’s an urgent need for baseline surveys to understand the riverine and riparian biodiversity of Samoa’s river systems.
Why Citizen Science?
Academics have several definitions of citizen science. But broadly, The Science of Citizen Science, a 2021 compendium on the subject, defines it as “refers to the active engagement of the general public in scientific research tasks.” (Link: The Citizen Science, Springer)
One hardly finds any examples of citizen science focusing on rivers from Samoa, or even Oceania.
The evolution of citizen science and natural science is closely related, the authors note. From Japanese’s observation of cherry blossoms in Tokyo and Kyoto in the 8th century to German naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Ferdinand Müller traversing the globe to understand the natural world in the 18./19th: the curiosity of ordinary citizens have shaped the natural sciences.
The 21st century has seen several citizen science projects in the field of natural history, such as Orchid Observers by the UK’s Natural History Museum (Link: Orchid Observer) and Notes from Nature by Zooniverse, a digital platform for people-powered research (Link: Zooniverse Platform). Some even address river systems; such as the Schone Rivieren, where citizens were trained to monitor waste in two rivers in the Netherlands (Link: https://www.schonerivieren.org/). But one hardly finds any examples of citizen science focusing on rivers from Samoa, or even Oceania.
The 2012 UNEP report investigating freshwater ecosystems in the Pacific Island nations found several constraints, such as limited human, financial and resource management. It also identified brain drain and lack of technical and governance capacity as key challenges.
Back to The project
The Übersee-Museum-NUS collaboration aims to address these challenges. On the first day, a group of 15 students were paired with a Samoan illustrator. This cultural exercise allowed students to make memories with the river, create art about the river, and share their experiences. The participants enthusiastically unleashed their creativity through TikTok videos, and paintings as well as making crowns made from natural plant materials.
Sethi says he didn’t want to jump straight to data collection, and activities allowed students to make a “connection”.
One student wrote in a feedback form, “...my favourite part is the painting because even though I did not know how to paint professionally I was still given the chance to express how I interpreted the River. It was a way of being myself…”
While all the participants knew about–through stories, lessons, and pictures–the river, it turned out that many hadn’t visited it. One student noted that she had only read about the river, but she now has “a much better understanding of the river after visiting it physically, in terms of how it looks, seeing its water flow, the scale of the river width, the vegetation around and just the general feel of being around it.”
The second part of the project encouraged the students to take measurements and record the data on a digital platform. Diana Michler-Kozma explains that tasks included measuring the velocity of the river, collecting the chemical parameters, and catching macroinvertebrates.
The history of science in the Pacific Island nations is shaped by colonisation.
The history of science in the Pacific Island nations is shaped by colonisation. Samoa was a German colony from 1899 to 1915 and was then ruled jointly by Britain and New Zealand till January 1, 1962. As a result, the few existing natural history collections from Samoa are spread out across the world, explains Michler-Kozma. There’s an urgent need to map and document the current state of natural resources and freshwater biodiversity in Samoa. Local perspectives and participation are essential; for instance, the scientists learnt during the citizen science project that Vaisigano isn’t just a river. It is a river system.
Luckily, in today’s world, one cannot just go to another country, grab whatever crawls and pack it up. Some laws prevent that, Diana Michler-Kozma says. Cooperation between different countries becomes essential. As part of the Übersee-Museum-NUS collaboration, the former’s small collection from Samoa was digitised to be accessible to other researchers.
She hopes that the project grows to include more Samoans who can add enough data to the app for scientists and researchers to use it for investigations.
Michael Stiller wishes to co-create a lesson plan with his colleagues at NUS, “so they can keep going.”
The participants too felt an urge to do more since the workshop. As one student noted in the feedback form, “It has changed my perspective on how the river should be. Because I thought it was clean….” The workshop gave her foundational knowledge of the river, and she wrote, “I want to change what was happening to the river.”