Citizen Scientists: The Unsung Heroes at the U.S.-Mexico Border
People are key in helping nonprofits collect wildlife data to fight harmful industrialized operations at the border. Here’s why.
Canyon wrens flew overhead as I scaled a rocky wash in Humboldt Canyon, an inner arm of Arizona’s Patagonia Mountains. Over a dozen puddles of water glistened around me, some small as frying pans and others wide as boulders, all connected by streams of icy November rain. I followed the flow along crumbling cliff walls until I reached the source — a chain of plunge pools. The one nearest me was four feet deep.
I paused to assess my options. I had volunteered to check a local nonprofit’s remote wildlife camera in this canyon, and the board warned me of a challenging trip. After a bumpy, two-hour drive to the end of a road, I would need to don a pack and enter the backcountry, hike loose dirt hills, cross rapid streams, and bushwhack through a snare of thorny brush. This, I could do. What I hadn’t been told was that the camera was beyond these pools. To move forward, I’d need to suck it up and wade through them.
I grounded myself with the reminder that, by volunteering in the field, I was part of a growing movement of “citizen scientists:” people who collect data, either on their own or with a coordinated group, to support local conservation efforts. In Arizona, citizen scientists like me satisfy many needs for wildlife organizations. We take photos of animals and plants and either share them directly with nonprofits or upload them to databases like Nature’s Notebook, The Hummingbird Project, and iNaturalist. Citizen scientists are also “watchdogs,” people who report concerning or exciting developments in nature — like acid mine drainage or a rare jaguar sighting — to local nonprofits.
I wanted to help fight hard rock mining in the Patagonia Mountains, say no to America’s border wall, and raise a flag for today’s climate crisis — that’s why I was there. So I stripped from the waist down, hugged my shoes and pants to my chest, and hauled into the water with little more grace than a cow. The sounds that burst from my chest echoed a cow, too, as the region’s recent rains froze my skin and splashed up my thighs.
I climbed out of the pools when the canyon walls widened enough, sun dried until I could redress, and kept hiking. The trees above me — home to a bonded pair of Mexican Spotted Owls — shook their branches in the wind, and a camera sat just beyond a bend where I’d been told I would find it.
Pulling the camera from its box, I sat in the shade of wilted leaves and flipped through the photos. The images on this camera would help nonprofits and their alliances educate legislators and file lawsuits. Just a few years before, a Patagonia-based nonprofit had protected the pair of Mexican Spotted Owls from mining for a second time, all thanks to citizen scientists and the data collected in this canyon.
What else, I wondered, could citizen scientists help accomplish along the U.S.-Mexico border? What other fights could we win for wildlife, if given the chance?
To answer these questions, I shadowed two Arizona locals: Glen Goodwin, a long-term citizen scientist and cofounder of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance (PARA), and Emily Burns, a scientist for Tucson-based nonprofit Sky Island Alliance. Both shared their thoughts on the challenge of collecting data in Arizona, the importance of citizen scientists, and how newcomers can contribute to ongoing conservation efforts.
One Photo is Worth A Hundred Lawsuits
The camera gave a barely-perceptible click as it slipped from its metal box.
“Whoops.” Glen Goodwin laughed. “I probably should’ve turned it off first.”
Goodwin, covered in sweat from hiking thirty minutes through the desert — past rickety cattle guards, around spiny grass shrubs, over the deflated remains of a hooded skunk, and up towering rock boulders — crouched and settled the device on his knee.
To the untrained eye, the hunk of green plastic looked more like a walkie talkie from the 90s than a piece of wildlife equipment. Out came the SD card, its contents more precious than gold for Goodwin, before he popped it into the digital camera at his hip.
For PARA, a community-driven nonprofit headquartered three miles north of the Patagonia Mountains, wildlife cameras and the volunteers who check them are important weapons in the fight against local mining.
The Patagonia Mountains comprise a 15-mile stretch of highlands, canyons, and gulches that’s home to over 100 sensitive, threatened, and endangered species — including the Mexican Spotted Owl, the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, the Lesser Long-Nosed Bat, and the ocelot. These species create a rich, biologically diverse area of the Southwestern U.S. rarely seen elsewhere. But many of them are vulnerable now, their habitats a casualty of local mining activity.
In 2006, Patagonia, Arizona watched as a wave of companies purchased many of the region’s inactive mine sites from the 1940s and 1960s. Exploratory drilling, bulldozing, and construction followed in the Patagonias in 2010 and 2011. Many residents believed nothing could be done. But Goodwin disagreed. He believed the town could fight — and win — if a few passionate locals had science and policy on their side.
From 2011 on, Goodwin embraced his role as a citizen scientist and spent several hours a week hiking into the Patagonia Mountains, armed with nothing but a backpack, a Canon DSLR, and two dozen wildlife cameras. He placed these cameras in locations threatened by mine activity, hiding them below bushes, between boulders, or simply chaining them to trees when no better location could be found.
Goodwin thought if PARA — the small nonprofit he’d just cofounded — snapped proof of an endangered species like a jaguar or an ocelot, he’d be able to present a case against mining in the Patagonias to the United States Forest Service (U.S.F.S.).
The U.S.F.S. reviews every mining application or land patent put forth in the Patagonia Mountains. “I had hoped time-stamped images of threatened wildlife would convince the U.S.F.S. to retract their approvals and postpone new ones,” Goodwin said. If not, litigation was an option too. The U.S.F.S. could always be forced to reconsider.
Over time, Goodwin recruited volunteers to help collect data. Locals from the towns of Patagonia, Sonoita, and Elgin hiked into the mountains and documented what they saw. Had mine-employed geologists (Goodwin calls them biostitutes) passed through a wash, identifiable by the shiny metal tags or pink ribbons they leave at sample sites? Had rock cliffs crumbled from the force of nearby mine blasts? Were red (iron), yellow (sulfuric acid), or black (manganese) minerals from abandoned mines staining critical water sources?
Citizen scientists took photos and videos of all these things, trying to keep a visual record of any activity that threatened native animal and plant species. To Goodwin’s surprise, tourists also got involved, emailing PARA personal photos of anything they saw during their visits. “We were so thankful to see everyone coming together,” he said. “We realized anyone can contribute — no one should be left out.”
But taking these photos left a sour taste in everyone’s mouths.
“It was difficult,” Goodwin recalled as he scrolled through the photos from the remote wildlife camera. He paused to show me a photo of a mouse with its nose stuck in the camera lens, whiskers all askew, then shrugged. “Still is. Hiking past open pits and mining claims, knowing places like Humboldt Canyon might be gone someday. We document the damage to spread awareness, but focusing our cameras on carnage instead of on the beauty around us… It wears at you.”
Still, Goodwin smiled as he held out his camera screen, pointing at the creatures captured by the subtle flash of the lens. Here’s a black bear, his healthy fur coat appearing more golden than dark, sniffing along leaves in search of acorns. There’s a doe, eyes shining in the sun as she guides two fawns toward a water source. This lemur-looking animal with rings around its tail is a coatimundi, a sort of desert raccoon.
The photos were bright and high-quality — perfect for putting in a nature report, adding to a regional newsletter, or sharing on social media. But as Goodwin reached the end of the SD card, his shoulders sagged. “I had expected a few hundred shots,” he said. “This camera only took thirty.”
Hundreds of animals, Goodwin explained, used to pass through the canyon every three months: families of javelina (wild pigs), troops of coatimundi, solitary bobcats, even the occasional playful deer mouse or butterfly. Thirty pictures over eleven months was down from years past. Even more disappointing were the consequences of this decline for Goodwin’s conservation efforts. The wildlife camera had only captured common species like squirrels and flycatchers. Not even a mountain lion, one of the big cats found in Southern Arizona, had visited the drinking hole.
Abundant photos and videos give PARA and other nonprofits, like Defenders of Wildlife, Sky Island Alliance, and the Center of Biological Diversity, the ammo they need to win lawsuits against the U.S.F.S. In 2012, multiple nonprofits used data — including photos submitted by citizen scientists — to sue the Forest Service for approving exploratory drilling plans in an area where listed species live, eat, and mate.
“Based on the opinions of scientific experts, studies and reports, observations of local residents, and even documents from the Forest Service itself,” wrote Heather Murray, legal fellow for Defenders of Wildlife, “[we] demonstrated that the project area contained suitable habitat for listed species like the jaguar.” Courts in Tucson studied this documentation and ruled against the U.S.F.S., who withdrew their approval as a result.
In 2017, the magazine High Country News reported a similar problem in a neighboring area of the Patagonia Mountains. “Arizona Mining, Fish and Wildlife, and local birders have known for decades that Mexican spotted owls roosted in Patagonia canyons,” they wrote. “However, the agency determined that exploratory drilling posed no danger to threatened and endangered species, partly because it had no evidence that owls were nesting near the site.”
The evidence did exist, and Defenders of Wildlife stepped in, using owl sightings documented by citizens to request and win a cease and desist of mining activity in the canyons — at least until Arizona Mining, Inc. and Arizona Fish and Wildlife could properly evaluate the effects mining and drilling would have on the area.
So, fewer photos mean fewer wins for Arizona nonprofits. If drilling disrupts habitats and scares off wildlife, mining companies have less to worry about; there are now fewer sightings to use against them. Meanwhile, lawsuits become complicated for the opposing side. Not having a large number of photos, or consistent coverage across several years, may make the difference between winning or losing litigation against a mining company.
Wildlife cameras and the volunteers who check them are direly important — so what about the many cameras that go missing? The day I shadowed Goodwin, we checked six cameras across four canyons. Two were M.I.A.
This, I later discovered, happens all the time.
“About fifty percent of our cameras go missing at some point in their lives,” Bryon Lichtenhan, field coordinator at Sky Island Alliance, told me somberly. “We put stickers on them to let people know they’re for research purposes, but it doesn’t make a difference — they still disappear.” Others, he added, are merely damaged, taken to by crowbar or bat until the lens breaks. By whom, no one knows.
Since missing cameras render valuable data useless, Lichtenhan and his manager, Program Director Emily Burns, no longer entirely depend on remote wildlife cameras for their work. Instead, they train their citizen scientists to document animals at the U.S.-Mexico border through an alternative method: good old manual tracking.
Hot on the Trail of Wildlife Tracks
“Please let it be a coati.”
Burns knelt beside Lichtenhan in the dry desert sand and watched him circle a track with two fingers. The pair of Sky Island Alliance scientists had been awake since five a.m. Now closer to eight, they had parked at the U.S. border and motioned for me to get out of the truck. We were on the hunt for animal tracks — and Lichtenhan had just spotted something the two regarded with cautious optimism.
In the soft halo of dawn, prints seem to spring from the ground, a rather artistic rendering of animal tracks thanks to the dawn’s early morning shadows. Just kilometers away — a hop, skip, and jump over the rusty vehicle barriers and sagging barbed wire that line the border — Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains undulated, covered in trees and sun.
“I think it’s a raccoon,” Lichtenhan said finally, and Burns sighed.
Sky Island Alliance fights a different beast than mining. They oppose America’s border wall, an unnatural barrier that threatens wildlife migration. Many animals, including big cats like jaguars and mountain lions, evolved to roam long distances in search of food, water, and potential mates. These resources ensure a species’ genetic diversity, but with America’s wall, many species are forced to turn back at the gates.
Burns and Lichtenhan planned to use their trip — with me tagging along as a guinea pig — to determine if the particular stretch of border wall would be a good place to show citizen scientists-in-training how to photograph animal tracks and document where wildlife attempts a border crossing.
Once volunteers graduate a Sky Island Alliance tracking workshop, they’re added to Sky Island Nature Watch, a community database hosted on iNaturalist. The documentation volunteers share on iNaturalist post-workshop helps Burns understand how wildlife are adapting to the wall, where they’re making their crossings, and whether certain species have stopped migrating altogether. Then, she compiles these findings and presents them, along with the images, to other organizations to help them oppose government border construction.
“We couldn’t do this work without volunteers,” Burns said. Citizen scientists collect thousands of data points for Sky Island Alliance every year. In the past, this work has allowed researchers like Burns to “provide the first photographs of ocelots living in Arizona, […] inform and advocate for conservation of jaguars and other carnivores, map important linkages for wildlife, and support new wildlife crossings across our highways.”
We spent nearly five hours at the border, poking around for tracks and taking photos of where a javelina and black bear had successfully pushed under a section of loose barbed-wire fencing. As we drove back later that day, our bodies shuddering like wind-up teeth in a truck that’s seen its share of wayward rocks and gaping potholes, we stopped to chat with a Border Patrol agent parked overlooking the Sierra Madres.
While Sky Island Alliance hasn’t experienced legal issues with Arizona law enforcement, the U.S. Border Patrol isn’t often happy to see nonprofits and journalists at the border. The conversation remained carefully cordial — not too detailed and not too friendly — until Lichtenhan mentioned how we spent our morning. Then, the agent’s face lit up, eyes alert under his green Border Patrol baseball cap.
“I saw a mountain lion kill up the road a way,” he said. “Dragged a deer carcass clean across the road and down into the brush. I bet you can still see the marks.”
Half learning out his window, he pulled up a picture of the cat’s paw print on his phone. The track, massive and powerful, spanned the length of his hand.
The run-in gave Lichtenhan a lingering smile. As he took Burns and me on a twenty-minute detour to track down the deer carcass and record the cat prints, a renewed sense of energy hummed through his sporadic work chatter.
I sat back and paged through the wildlife-tracking handbook Burns gave me, trying to read about measurements and paw prints as the truck lurched over rocks and through running streams. But eventually, my thoughts turned to volunteers and the roles they play — for local, national, and even global nonprofits.
The biggest lesson I’d learned from Goodwin and Burns about citizen scientists wasn’t that they need a degree or intense training to contribute. It wasn’t that citizen scientists can only be locals, or professionals, or retirees.
The biggest lesson was the opposite. Young or old, working or retired, locals or tourists: we can all play a part to conserve Arizona’s rich biodiversity. If even a Border Patrol agent, someone who fundamentally believes in America’s border wall, can be a citizen scientist and pass data to the nonprofits who need it, then, wow.
There is hope, real hope, for Arizona’s wildlife yet.
Note: This story was written to satisfy graduation requirements for the author’s MA Science Writing thesis at Johns Hopkins University.
