This meeting and presentation took place both in person at the American Museum of Natural History and concurrently online via Zoom.
President Peter Davenport called the meeting to order at approximately 7:02 PM.
Peter welcomed attendees to the final members meeting of the 2025–2026 program year and thanked the American Museum of Natural History for welcoming the Society back for the evening. He expressed appreciation to Daniel Zieger and Kate Schmidt of the Museum, and to Debbie Mullins and Amanda Bielskis for coordinating closely with the Museum and the Liederkranz Club.
Peter thanked the teams that participated in the Great Gull Island (GGI) Birdathon during the first weekend of May, including the Quack Pack, Field Trip Committee, Linnaean Listers, Peep Patrol, Tuesday Morning Migration Walk, Crescendo Chickens, Slow Birds, Slow Birding Saturday, Our Local Patches, and the Chatty Starling. Although final results were still being tallied, he noted that the Quack Pack was leading by species count, with 102 species over two days, and that Slow Birding Saturday was the standout by fundraising total, with $3,127.50 raised. He encouraged members who had pledged to fulfill their pledges and encouraged those with the means to contribute in support of GGI research and programs. He emphasized the importance of this support for Roseate Tern nest boxes, researchers’ basic needs, and the long-term future of the island’s work as climate change and sea-level rise continue to affect coastal nesting habitat. He also thanked Kristin Ellington for organizing the Birdathon.
Peter thanked members who completed the membership survey and noted that the responses would help guide planning for field trips, programs, and the Society’s broader strategy. Members who expressed interest in committee service would be contacted, and major takeaways from the survey would be shared later in the summer. He then welcomed 16 new members of the Society: Janie Bailey, Meredith Dahlrose, Jessica Dawson, Paulina de Amaral, Frederique Frowein, Barbara Futter, Neil Goldenberg, Jeff Gore, Laura Jewell, Matt Klein, Liisa Lunden, Julius Marinov, Andrea Mercado, Rajesh Rathi, Mike Schafer, and Deborah Stewart.
Peter reminded members to consult the field trip calendar and registration dates for upcoming trips, including additional trips planned for June and the summer. He thanked the Society’s field trip leaders and field trip committee, as well as Karen Becker and the program committee, for their work throughout the year.
Lecture Program
Peter introduced the evening’s speaker, Dr. Deja Perkins, Assistant Professor of Forestry and Extension at Tuskegee University.
Lecture Title: Patterns of Participation: Using Environmental Participatory Projects to Understand Data Gaps in Conservation and Nature Access in Urban & Rural Neighborhoods
Dr. Perkins presented on the role of participatory science in conservation, the power of volunteer-generated environmental data, and the ways participation patterns can reveal gaps in both data and nature access. She began by describing her path from Chicago to Tuskegee University and to geospatial research, using that trajectory to frame a central theme of the evening: location matters. Across examples involving climate change, public health, agriculture, natural resources, and pathogen spread, she showed how spatial data can reveal patterns that would otherwise be difficult to see.
Dr. Perkins defined participatory science broadly, encompassing citizen science, community science, crowdsourcing, participatory monitoring, and related approaches. She highlighted large-scale projects such as eBird, iNaturalist, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), Falling Fruit, Christmas Bird Count, and Project FeederWatch, emphasizing that birders and other nature observers collect data at a scale that would be impossible for scientists and technicians alone. At the same time, because observations are geolocated, researchers can see which places are sampled, oversampled, or not sampled at all. Her research shows that participatory science observations are often fewer in areas with higher populations of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, and that participation patterns are also shaped by income, education, age, access to technology, cultural relevance, and urban-rural differences.
A key part of Dr. Perkins’s talk focused on place connection and sense of place, or how people experience and make meaning of places, including feelings of comfort, safety, belonging, fear, or exclusion. People often make observations in places they already frequent, such as near home, in nearby parks, or in familiar and comfortable spaces. Dr. Perkins connected these patterns to larger historical and social forces, including forced and voluntary migration, settlement patterns, discriminatory policies, zoning of pollutants, privatization of resources, distance from natural spaces, and historical norms that have shaped relationships between communities and the outdoors. Neighborhoods, she explained, function not only as physical geographies but also as social and cultural boundaries that influence access, belonging, and participation.
Using case studies from CoCoRaHS, iNaturalist, and eBird, Dr. Perkins showed how these dynamics appear in practice. She discussed participation patterns in rainfall monitoring and biodiversity projects, noting that volunteers often contribute observations close to home and at times that fit their schedules. Turning specifically to eBird and iNaturalist, she explored how observation probability relates to race, income, and geography, including local examples from New York City at the census-tract level. She emphasized that participation gaps have consequences not only for science, but also for communities and biodiversity, affecting what is known, valued, protected, and funded.
In the final portion of the talk, Dr. Perkins considered how participatory science projects might be made more inclusive and more useful. She identified barriers to engagement, including cost, lack of technology or training, lack of community or peer support, lack of belonging, unaligned values, language and disability access, lack of awareness, lack of access, and lack of invitation. She encouraged reframing project narratives to center communities at the margins, build cycles of fair knowledge reciprocity, and support system change through IDEAL Science, a framework that incorporates positionality, relationality, centering practices, personal and interpersonal transformation, and fair knowledge production. She concluded by stressing that this work is most effective in partnership, through workshops, nature-based programs, education, and community-building rooted in place.
At approximately 7:59 PM, the Q&A session began with questions from the in-person audience and later included questions submitted via Zoom. Discussion included how rare-bird chasing and eBird hotspots can skew observation data, as well as the role of schools, libraries, museums, gardens, and other community spaces in introducing people to birds and nature. In response, Dr. Perkins emphasized that participatory science projects should not begin by placing data-collection burdens on communities, but rather by building joy, curiosity, comfort, and connection to birds and nature. Following the conclusion of the Q&A, Dr. Perkins was thanked for a thought-provoking program. The meeting concluded at approximately 8:22 PM.
The presentation and Q&A session were recorded in their entirety. The recording is available through the Linnaean Society website and YouTube channel.
Respectfully submitted,
Michelle D’Mello
Recording Secretary