The Hive Mind: Connecting Extension, AI, Volunteer Engagement, and Community Science
Teaching & Educational Technologies
Lisa Mason
Horticulture Extension Specialist
Colorado State University
Centennial
Abstract
Extension has an opportunity to engage volunteers in community science projects given Extension’s service in addressing community needs, managing volunteers, and translating science-based information. Native Bee Watch, a community science program offered through Colorado State University Extension, enables volunteer community scientists to identify and monitor bees via eight morphospecies categories. Colorado is home to over 1,000 bee species (Armstead et al., 2024; Scott et al., 2011) and is the seventh fastest growing state (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018). Native bee populations are declining worldwide, and more effort is needed to increase public awareness and generate engagement to mitigate bee populations’ decline (National Research Council, 2007).
With an interdisciplinary research team, the first goal of NBW is to create a ripple effect of engagement and education when community scientists bring learning back to their communities to make informed decisions around supporting pollinators. The second goal of NBW is to contribute to research in three disciplines: 1) social science research on the volunteers’ learning experience from training, technology, and data collection (Vilen et al., 2023), 2) ecological trends on morphospecies and volunteer data accuracy (Mason and Arathi, 2019), and 3) using AI as a tutoring system to enhance volunteer learning and engagement. Through a National Science Foundation grant, the team is endeavoring to combine machine vision AI used to identify volunteer photos with AI to assess leaners’ existing knowledge. The combination will lead to a user-friendly platform that provides tailored lessons to the individual volunteer (Sreedharan et al., 2025). This presentation will discuss research results, post-evaluation data from volunteers, successes, and challenges of managing a community science program through Extension.
Authors: Lisa Mason
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Lisa Mason Horticulture Extension Specialist, Colorado State University Extension, Colorado, 80112