The diversity and evolution of ecological and environmental citizen science

Abstract

Citizen science—the involvement of volunteers in data collection, analysis and interpretation—simultaneously supports research and public engagement with science, and its profile is rapidly rising. Citizen science represents a diverse range of approaches, but until now this diversity has not been quantitatively explored. We conducted a systematic internet search and discovered 509 environmental and ecological citizen science projects. We scored each project for 32 attributes based on publicly obtainable information and used multiple factor analysis to summarise this variation to assess citizen science approaches. We found that projects varied according to their methodological approach from ‘mass participation’ (e.g. easy participation by anyone anywhere) to ‘systematic monitoring’ (e.g. trained volunteers repeatedly sampling at specific locations). They also varied in complexity from approaches that are ‘simple’ to those that are ‘elaborate’ (e.g. provide lots of support to gather rich, detailed datasets). There was a separate cluster of entirely computer-based projects but, in general, we found that the range of citizen science projects in ecology and the environment showed continuous variation and cannot be neatly categorised into distinct types of activity. While the diversity of projects begun in each time period (pre 1990, 1990–99, 2000–09 and 2010–13) has not increased, we found that projects tended to have become increasingly different from each other as time progressed (possibly due to changing opportunities, including technological innovation). Most projects were still active so consequently we found that the overall diversity of active projects (available for participation) increased as time progressed. Overall, understanding the landscape of citizen science in ecology and the environment (and its change over time) is valuable because it informs the comparative evaluation of the ‘success’ of different citizen science approaches. Comparative evaluation provides an evidence-base to inform the future development of citizen science activities.

The potential for citizen science to produce reliable and useful information in ecology

“…We used a similar typology, recognizing considerable variation within and among groups (Pocock et al. ).…”

“…Our grouping builds on the pyramid framework of the U.S. Geological Survey's Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative (Corn et al 2005): intensive research at handpicked sites at the top, standardized monitoring with rigorous sampling design over a broad area in the middle, and coarse measurements in a checklist approach at a national scale at the bottom. We used a similar typology, recognizing considerable variation within and among groups (Pocock et al 2017).…”

“…Biological projects range from national-scale projects, such as the U.S. Audubon Society's century-old Christmas Bird Count (Dunn et al 2005) and the U.K. Open Air Laboratory (OPAL) surveys of trees, insects, or biodiversity (OPAL 2018), to in-depth research by small teams, such as those sponsored by the Earthwatch Institute (Brightsmith et al 2008;Earthwatch 2018). Many other ecological projects use data collected by volunteers (e.g., Devictor et al 2010;Tulloch et al 2013;Pocock et al 2017). From the name itself, citizen science concerns scientific investigation and citizen engagement.…”

Mapping species distributions in 2 weeks using citizen science

“…Mass participation citizen science projects appealing to the public can be especially useful because they can take advantage of wide geographical coverage and potentially thousands of observers. By recruiting help from the public, projects have been able to study a range of taxa and ecological phenomena (Pocock et al ., ,b). The validity of such projects, however, has been questioned; for example, most citizen scientists lack the expertise to identify species (Lewandowski & Specht, ; Maldonado et al ., ), records tend to be opportunistic with uneven spatial coverage (Silvertown, ), and sometimes the lack of formal protocols makes it difficult to understand why some species were not recorded (Pocock et al ., ).…”

Developing integrative systematics in the informatics and genomic era, and calling for a global Biodiversity Cyberbank

“…Distributed work such as specimen label transcription is helping to make collection data accessible for further analysis. Such "Citizen Science" has begun to be widely utilized in biology (Pocock et al, 2015(Pocock et al, , 2017Van Vliet & Moore, 2016;Ballard et al, 2017).…”