Citizen science and wildlife biology: Synergies and challenges

Abstract

Citizen science (CS) has evolved over the past decades as a working method involving interested citizens in scientific research, for example by reporting observations, taking measurements or analysing data. In the past, research on animal behaviour has been benefitting from contributions of citizen scientists mainly in the field of ornithology but the full potential of CS in ecological and behavioural sciences is surely still untapped. Here, we present case studies that successfully applied CS to research projects in wildlife biology and discuss potentials and challenges experienced. Our case studies cover a broad range of opportunities: largescale CS projects with interactive online tools on bird song dialects, engagement of stakeholders as citizen scientists to reduce human-wildlife conflicts, involvement of students of primary and secondary schools in CS projects as well as collaboration with the media leading to successful recruitment of citizen scientists. Each case study provides a short overview of the scientific questions and how they were approached to showcase the potentials and challenges of CS in wildlife biology.Based on the experience of the case studies, we highlight how CS may support research in wildlife biology and emphasise the value of fostering communication in CS to improve recruitment of participants and to facilitate learning and mutual trust among different groups of interest (e.g., researchers, stakeholders, students).We further show how specific training for the participants may be needed to obtain reliable data. We consider CS as a suitable tool to enhance research in wildlife biology through the application of open science procedures (i.e., open access to articles and the data on publicly available repositories) to support transparency and sharing experiences.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Aligning citizen science with best practice: Threatened species conservation in Australia

“…A secondary goal appeared to be education and raising awareness among participants and the public more broadly. Herein lies a common trade‐off among many citizen science efforts (Chase & Levine, ; Frigerio et al, ). This conundrum can lead to a mismatch between the actual and communicated objectives of the project among all relevant stakeholders (Eveleigh et al, ).…”

“…In principle, many of the perceived flaws associated with citizen science data can be managed at the project planning, data review or data analysis stage (Davies, Stevens, Meekan, Struve, & Rowcliffe, ; Galloway, Tudor, & Haegen, ; Gilfedder et al, ; Lukyanenko, Parsons, & Wiersma, ), and recognition by analysts of the proper application of such data. There is a growing body of research demonstrating the robust utility of citizen science data for achieving a range of objectives, including: informing conservation questions about where to carry out management, improving knowledge gain, and achieving social‐ecological benefits such as education and public awareness (Frigerio et al, ; McKinley et al, ; Tulloch, Possingham, Joseph, Szabo, & Martin, ; Zapponi et al, ).…”

Storytelling for narrative approaches in citizen science: towards a generalized model

“…In the presented case study, stories helped communicate the results of citizen science activities to the public with great plasticity, authenticity and fun. The project "Visible Science" conducted at the Konrad Lorenz Research Station in Upper Austria (KLF, a Core Facility of the University of Vienna, Austria) aimed to understand the behavioural mechanisms of avian social life by combining long-term monitoring of individually marked animals with short-term experimental setups [Frigerio et al, 2018;Puehringer-Sturmayr et al, 2018]. Within the frame of the Austrian funding scheme Sparkling Science, promoted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Education and Research, researchers of the KLF involved pupils in the long-term monitoring of behavioural patterns of the avian model species.…”

Technological solutions for contributory citizen science: experiences from citizenMorph

“…The approach where citizens' can actively contribute data (contributory citizen science) is one [1]. While (contributory) citizen science has shown promising results in fields such as ecology, biology, or astronomy [2][3][4], less attention has been given to geomorphology and landform dynamics. There are only a few efforts to encourage citizen engagement on these topics [e.g., [5][6].…”