This citizen science project wants your assistance to extract information from various climate scientific graphics to help combat misinformation and support scientific communication. Using this project with your ākonga provides opportunities to build science literacy and student agency.
Climate change is an important, relevant and complex issue. It can be challenging to get comprehensive public engagement and understanding so it is often referred to as a wicked problem. The ClimateViz project’s goal is to transform how the public interacts with climate data with its research focusing on converting complex climate-related graphics into easy-to-understand textual descriptions. Its aim is to strengthen an automated fact-checking system to tackle climate misinformation.
ClimateViz
The ClimateViz citizen science team want to make climate science accessible and understandable for all.
URL: www.zooniverse.org/projects/albasu/climateviz
Reach: Worldwide
Nature of science focus: Online citizen science (OCS) projects can be used to develop any of the Nature of Science (NoS) substrands. Identify aspects of NoS that your students need to get better at or understand more fully and then frame your unit to be very clear about these things when you do them.
You can use ClimateViz to focus on these aspects:
- Understanding about science – learn about the ways in which the work of scientists interacts with society.
- Communicating in science – develop knowledge of the vocabulary, numeric and symbol systems, and conventions of science and use this knowledge to communicate about students’ own and others’ ideas.
Science capability focus: Interpret representations, Critique evidence
This project particularly supports the science capability ‘Interpret representations’ by encouraging students to think about:
- how data is presented
- what the representation tells us
- whether the information is accurate
- how it gets key messages across.
Science focus: climate change, visual literacy
Some suggested science concepts
- Communicating science knowledge using visual representations (graphs, diagrams and infographics)
- Interpretating data
- Critical thinking
- Understanding the literacy components of a variety of visual representations
- Climate change
Empowering public understanding of climate science through precise interpretation of data visuals. We bridge the gap, clarify complexities, and debunk myths, ensuring every graphic translates into knowledge for action against misinformation.
Alba Su, Lead Researcher and Natural Language Processing (NLP) Specialist
Many concepts could be explored – focusing on a few can often be more powerful. Develop your learning outcomes and success criteria from these concepts as well as the NoS strand and the science capabilities.
Some examples of learning outcomes
Students can:
- deepen understanding about climate change
- show an increased understanding of ideas within, across and beyond texts
- take a critical approach to information and gain strategies for evaluating how accurate information is
- appreciate the value of infographics as a communication tool and how they can be misused
- understand that engaging with science via a citizen science project can make an impact on science research
- gain experience in science communication.
About ClimateViz
The ClimateViz project is an initiative of the Engineering Science Department at the University of Oxford. The project is dedicated to combating misinformation in climate science by making scientific graphics understandable to everyone.
The goal is to facilitate better understanding among non-experts, enhance transparency and support accurate media reporting and fact checking. By making climate science accessible and demystifying scientific data, the project aims to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and public understanding, helping to foster a well-informed dialogue on climate issues.
Nature of science
Scientists depend on empirical evidence – the gathering, analysing and interpreting of data – to produce scientific knowledge. They need to be able to communicate complex climate science information so that not only is it is accessible and understandable to all but it also helps combat misinformation. Visual representations are often used to summarise or illustrate a complex process.
The research focuses on converting complex climate-related graphics into easy-to-understand textual descriptions. Contributions to this citizen science project will help train machine learning models to recognise the veracity of statements related to climate science graphics.
Visual representations are often used to summarise or illustrate a complex process. Understanding how to read them accurately is an effective way to learn new information and increase effective communication.
The key goals of the research are to provide:
- enhanced clarity and accessibility
- data integrity and trustworthiness
- support for informed decision making
- public engagement and scientific literacy
- a resource for fact checking and journalism.
How does ClimateViz work
ClimateViz has created a comprehensive dataset of various climate science graphics, rich with reliable information. The goal is to create an automated fact-checking system to tackle climate misinformation. To achieve this, it needs to gather detailed, accurate manual descriptions.
Earth’s ice loss 1994–2017
Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice.
Source: Slater, T. et al. (2021). Review article: Earth’s ice imbalance. The Cryosphere, 15(1), 233–246. DOI: 10.5194/tc-15-233-2021.
There are three tasks in this project and each task includes a helpful tutorial. You can find these under the Classify tab.
- Title extraction – identify the title of a climate science graphic.
- Data representations – how has the data in the graphic been represented (for example, line chart, map, scatter plot).
- Summary of true facts – imagine you are factually describing the graph to someone who cannot see it.
Participants are asked to objectively describe significant elements observed in the graphic. Descriptions should include key datapoints, trends, comparisons and any notable anomalies or patterns.
It is important that the language used is clear and precise to ensure that the descriptions are accessible and useful for further analysis. This task requires careful observation and the ability to distil complex visual information into concise statements. This not only enhances understanding for non-experts but also provides structured data for training machine learning models to determine the veracity of climate claims.
NOTE: Before starting this project, ensure your ākonga have a basic understanding of climate science concepts. This knowledge will help them to accurately interpret the graphics.
See the related content green box below for a range of climate change resources.
Related content
The article Our atmosphere and climate – introduction has links to resources that inform students (and the general public) about the state of New Zealand’s climate.
We have lots of resources on the science of climate change – we recommend starting with Climate change resources – planning pathways. It groups Hub resources into key science and teaching concepts such as evidence and models and sea-level rise. You could also see the Climate change topic.
The article Climate change – a wicked problem for classroom inquiry provides additional information on how to tackle big socio-scientific issues.
Climate change, science and controversy looks at fake facts – from Galileo to the present.
In the article Read news like a scientist, discover how to approach science news like a scientist – see past the sensational and find the facts.
The Connected article Fake facts looks at misinformation, malinformation and disinformation in the online media landscape. It also suggests strategies for evaluating whether information is based on facts and whether it is worth sharing.
The article Understanding infographics provides background information on how infographics are constructed and why they are such a useful communication tool.
The Science Learning Hub has a number of graphs that could be used to prompt discussions.
See a selection of bilingual and reo Māori infographics and diagrams in this handy collection. Visual representations provide excellent opportunities to develop literacy practices and learn new information.
Our climate change collection annotates resources to unpack the science of climate change and associated socio-scientific issues.
Here are some planning tips for when you intend to use a citizen science project with your students. See these helpful webinars: Getting started with citizen science and Online citizen science.
Activity ideas
Using infographics challenges students to delve into infographics and how they present science information. This also has links to further resources and activities.
Reading graphs in science offers experiences in exploring and interpreting visual representations.
Interpreting representations using climate data helps students develop literacy and numeracy skills needed for reading and interpreting graphs.
Using weather data challenges students to use long-term weather datasets to create and interpret graphs.
Interpreting lake sediment data offers lots of opportunities (and helpful questions) to read and interpret graphic representations.
Useful links
Our Science communication – sorting fact from fiction Pinterest board curates resources that will aid educators in looking at not only science communication but also science and society.
See the 2023 Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor report He Uru Kahikatea: Building young people’s resilience through media and information literacy and digital citizenship skills. It proposes solutions to equip young people to understand how scientific evidence is generated, how uncertainty is communicated and how knowledge changes and advances.
In this article from The Spinoff, Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris provide tips to help learn the difference between information, misinformation and disinformation.
SCANZ (Science Communicators Association of New Zealand) provides a community for science communicators to discuss and debate their craft with others. It also hosts science communication events throughout Aotearoa.
Every year, the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize is awarded. Toby Morris won this in 2021 for his cartoon and animated graphics relating to COVID-19.
See the range of climate change infographics on the Climate Change Resources website.
NIWA provided datasets for Our atmosphere and climate 2020. This report provides information about the data sources and methodologies used to generate the datasets.
Stats NZ provides information about atmosphere and climate indicators.
Acknowledgement
ClimateViz is a project within the Zooniverse platform. Zooniverse, the world’s largest platform for people-powered research, is a collaboration between Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, the University of Oxford, the University of Minnesota, 2.5 million participants and hundreds of researchers around the world. For the full list of 80+ active Zooniverse projects, check out zooniverse.org/projects.
