SoundCitizen: Students and Citizens Conducting Significant Science on the Chemical Links Between Urban Settings and Aquatic Systems

What chemicals from consumer and household products are traveling from our homes to Puget Sound? What impact are they having on the marine ecosystem? How can we use this knowledge to create a better-informed populace?

SoundCitizen is a community-based water sampling network that has captured national and international attention as a citizen science effort that directly links the daily actions of citizens to impacts on the health of Puget Sound. SoundCitizen believes that citizen science can be of high quality resulting in novel publishable research involving volunteers of all ages and scientific expertise.

SoundCitizen was started, and is largely staffed, by undergraduate students in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. We focus on emerging pollutants that are ubiquitous in urban households, have multiple sources and pathways into the aquatic environment, and which are likely to increase in flux to the environment in coming years because they are found in ‘green’ products of growing popularity. Our focus on chemicals found in household products places us at the forefront of the intersecting fields of human and environmental health.  SoundCitizen has developed novel methodologies for evaluating natural and anthropogenic compounds in environmental samples (Keil and Neibauer 2009) and work with a region-wide network of hundreds of volunteers to help collect information on the concentrations, fluxes, sources and fates of emerging pollutants in water sheds and marine waters.

At its core, outreach is woven into the very fiber of SoundCitizen; education of undergraduates in aquatic chemistry and education of our volunteers and school groups through organized inquiry and curricular materials. The outreach and educational activities associated with the project empowers all volunteer students and citizens, regardless of their level of interaction in SoundCitizen, to reduce their personal risk and improve the health of their homes and their environments.  By infusing the scientific enterprise into the learning and leisure activities of our students and volunteers, we can help create or enhance a link between their lives and the scientific enterprise.  Through these education efforts, we better understand effective ways of communicating about our science.

The entire premise of SoundCitizen is built upon the belief that a broad community can achieve more through coordinated action, resulting in scientifically and educationally rigorous contributions to research on human impacts on aquatic resources.