Community science projects begin when frontline leaders facing environmental injustice set goals and go about producing the knowledge needed for self-determination. Projects follow a non-linear trajectory that may include organizing, mobilization, empirical documentation, and advocacy based on the results.

Read about milestones achieved by projects around the world on the Stories page.

Projects

Approaches

There are a few main approaches for collecting environmental evidence that documents reality and supports locally held goals:

• Establishment of a baseline → change detection
• Environmental surveillance (Internet of Things, trend spotting)
• Exploring existing data (FOIA, data science, close reading)
• Watchdogging, hotspotting, bounty hunting
• Study Design with a disprovable hypothesis

In Public Lab's educational work, we use the following framework: