Exploring citizen science in post-socialist space: Uncovering its hidden character in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Citizen science is a relatively new phenomenon in the Czech Republic and currently a general overview of existing citizen science projects is not available. This presents the challenge to uncover the ‘hidden’ citizen science landscapes. The main objective of this paper is to explore the (public) representation of citizen science (CS) projects and to describe their heterogeneity. The study aims to answer the question of what type of projects in the Czech Republic meet the definition of citizen science. Based on a specific methodological data-base search approach, we compiled a set of CS projects (N = 73). During the classification process, two general citizen science categories were identified. The first group (N = 46) consists of “pure” CS projects with a prevalence towards the natural sciences, principally ornithology, and thus corresponding to general European trends. Citizens usually participate in such research in the form of data collection and basic interpretation, and a high level of cooperation between academia and NGOs was detected. The second group of “potential” CS projects (N = 27) entails various forms of public participation in general, frequently coordinated by NGOs. Based on these results, we discuss the position of citizen science in the Czech Republic, including socially-oriented citizen science. Further research is strongly encouraged to achieve a more in-depth insight into this social phenomenon.

Citizen science as a new approach in Geography and beyond: Review and reflections

“…The movement of empowering citizen scientists appeared to have progressed faster in the European "western countries" compared to Central and Eastern European countries. More details for the Czech case are provided by one of the papers in this issue (Duží et al, 2019). The uneven production of knowledge with citizen scientists were also described by Irwin (1995).…”

Citizen Science in Europe

“…An increasing number of country-level reports further complement the overall picture, mostly in Western Europe, for instance, in the United Kingdom (Tweddle et al 2012), Switzerland (science\cité 2015, Strasser and Haklay 2018), France (Houllier and Merilhou-Goudard 2016), Spain (Serrano et al 2017), Germany, and Austria (Pettibone et al 2017), as well as a massive citizen science biodiversity project in Portugal (Tiago et al 2017). There are also reports for some Central and Eastern European countries, such as Latvia (Prūse and Dātava 2017) and the Czech Republic (Duží et al 2019).…”

“…For example, in the Czech Republic, citizen science (občanská věda) has made progress, including a higher rate of cooperation between academia and NGOs, a greater popularisation of the practice, and the amplification of citizen science projects, primarily via the Czech Academy of Sciences and NGOs (e.g. Czech Ornithological Society; Duží et al 2019). Moreover, citizen science is now part of one university's curriculum.…”

Humanitarian Mapping as a Contribution to Achieving Sustainable Development Goals: Research into the Motivation of Volunteers and the Ideal Setting of Mapathons

“…We should not see levels of participation as a hierarchically determined sequence, with level 1 (in Haklay's scale, equal to crowdsourcing) being "worse" than level 4 (equivalent to extreme citizen science, according to Haklay). Indeed, deep research conducted among Czech citizen science projects (see Duží et al [48]) shows that crowdsourcing is a feature of the majority of such projects. As we focus on spatial data collection, we often use the term volunteered geographic information (VGI), defined by Goodchild [11] and further elaborated, for example, by Sui et al [45].…”