Scientific data from and for the citizen

Abstract

Powered by advances of technology, today’s Citizen Science projects cover a wide range of thematic areas and are carried out from local to global levels. This wealth of activities creates an abundance of data, for example, in the forms of observations submitted by mobile phones; readings of low-cost sensors; or more general information about peoples’ activities. The management and possible sharing of this data has become a research topic in its own right. We conducted a survey in the summer of 2015 in order to collectively analyze the state of play in Citizen Science. This paper summarizes our main findings related to data access, standardization and data preservation. We provide examples of good practices in each of these areas and outline actions to address identified challenges.

Developing Mobile Applications for Environmental and Biodiversity Citizen Science: Considerations and Recommendations

“…Data Management has become one of the central challenges to emerge with the growth of citizen science projects [18,19]. One important aspect of this is data privacy.…”

“…However, it can be a challenge to find existing apps with development documentation that is thorough, upto-date, and also includes feedback (such as reporting test results user experiences). A discussion of how it can sometimes be more time consuming to re-use a ready to use tool than to build a new one can be found in the Schade et al [19] assessment of invasive alien species apps and their potential for reuse. The need for a 'neutral' inventory (across topics) to aid the discovery and reuse of existing apps is clear.…”

Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling

“…New data sources are particularly relevant for policy making in the context of citizen science, as an integral component of public participation in policy in e.g. Europe (Schade et al, 2017), but also for monitoring Sustainable Development Goals, a research direction that the United Nations Global Pulse is exploring. Global Pulse is an innovation initiative of the United Nations working to harness big data, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to support sustainable development and humanitarian action (UN Global Pulse, 2017a), as in the case where data is used from social media as evidence for understanding movements and perceptions of migrants in Europe (UN Global Pulse, 2017b).…”

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

“…These mechanisms stimulate citizens to observe and learn and often result in data and mobile apps. Though many of these are very useful within each project, the challenge is to make them reusable across project initiatives and reproducible in the sense of open science (Schade et al, 2017b). Kerski (2015) has emphasized that new converging global trends, including geo awareness, geo enablement, geotechnologies, citizen science and storytelling -all have the potential to offer geography world-wide attention (from education and society) that may be unprecedented in the history of the discipline.…”