This article reports on an interdisciplinary evaluation of the pilot phase of a community-driven civic science project. The project investigates the distribution of heavy metals in air pollution using moss growing on street trees as a bio-indicator in two industrial-adjacent neighborhoods in Seattle, Washington (USA). One goal of the ongoing project is to meaningfully engage local urban youths (eighth to twelfth grade) in the scientific process as civic scientists, and teach them about environmental health, environmental justice, and urban forestry concepts in a place-based, urban-oriented environmental research project. We describe the collaborative context in which our project developed, evaluate the quality of youth-collected data through analysis of replicate samples, and assess participants’ learning, career interests, and overall appraisal of the pilot. Our results indicate that youth scientists collected usable samples (with acceptable precision among repeated samples), learned project content (with statistically significant increases in scores of test-style survey questions; p = 0.002), and appraised their engagement favorably (with 69% of participants reporting they liked the project). We observed few changes in career interests, however. We discuss our intention to use these preliminary insights to further our community-driven education, research, and action model to address environmental injustices.

This article conceptualizes homelessness on public lands within a social-ecological systems framework, exploring dynamics in public natural areas in the Seattle metropolitan area (USA), a system with a compact urban-to-wildland gradient. While prior research has studied the dynamics of unsheltered homelessness within particular parks or cities—often in areas where camping is prohibited—our interview-based study makes integrated considerations of these dynamics across a range of jurisdictions. We present a thematic analysis that examines professionally diverse perspectives on the dynamics, stressors, and outcomes of public natural area usage by unsheltered individuals. We found a generally uncoordinated system in continual motion, in which considerable resources were expended for short-term, site-specific solutions that yielded system-wide detrimental outcomes perceived for unsheltered individuals, social service and environmental institutions, and ecosystem health. We discuss how improved institutional coordination and mutual understanding about intersecting governance systems could sustain better public land, public health, and social outcomes.