The Invisible Prevalence of Citizen Science in Global Research: Migratory Birds and Climate Change

Abstract

Citizen science is a research practice that relies on public contributions of data. The strong recognition of its educational value combined with the need for novel methods to handle subsequent large and complex data sets raises the question: Is citizen science effective at science? A quantitative assessment of the contributions of citizen science for its core purpose – scientific research – is lacking. We examined the contribution of citizen science to a review paper by ornithologists in which they formulated ten central claims about the impact of climate change on avian migration. Citizen science was never explicitly mentioned in the review article. For each of the claims, these ornithologists scored their opinions about the amount of research effort invested in each claim and how strongly the claim was supported by evidence. This allowed us to also determine whether their trust in claims was, unwittingly or not, related to the degree to which the claims relied primarily on data generated by citizen scientists. We found that papers based on citizen science constituted between 24 and 77% of the references backing each claim, with no evidence of a mistrust of claims that relied heavily on citizen-science data. We reveal that many of these papers may not easily be recognized as drawing upon volunteer contributions, as the search terms “citizen science” and “volunteer” would have overlooked the majority of the studies that back the ten claims about birds and climate change. Our results suggest that the significance of citizen science to global research, an endeavor that is reliant on long-term information at large spatial scales, might be far greater than is readily perceived. To better understand and track the contributions of citizen science in the future, we urge researchers to use the keyword “citizen science” in papers that draw on efforts of non-professionals.

Citizen Science Terminology Matters: Exploring Key Terms

“…Another option is simply not to distinguish between the people involved in the project, using the same term for everyone. Several discussants on the email list raised this perspective: We stress that this approach is intended to provide greater recognition to volunteer contributions, not to give an excuse to ignore them (Cooper et al 2014).…”

The Priolo Atlas: A citizen science-based census initiative for supporting Pyrrhula murina habitat conservation and restoration policies in São Miguel Island (Azores, Portugal)

“…While the advantages of adaptive management based on sound scientific evidence has proved extremely effective, its implementation is constrained by the need of compiling appropriate datasets capable of reflecting ecosystems diversity in time and space. Citizen science -scientific research performed in part or in whole by volunteers (Newman et al, 2010;Robson, 2012;Cooper et al, 2014;Morzy, 2014) -has thus emerged as a most valuable solution to gather such large datasets (Devictor et al, 2010). The practice of citizen involvement in scientific projects is not really new (Cohn, 2008), especially in environmental monitoring projects, including biodiversity (Nascimento et al, 2014).…”

Wildlife/Roadkill Observation and Reporting Systems

“…reliable, verified wildlife data (Schmeller et al 2009;Ryder et al 2010;Cooper et al 2014). These volun teers are often professional biologists making wildlife observations 'on the side' and contributing these observations to various WROS (e.g.…”

“…CROS, United States). One perception of volunteer science-gathered data is that it may suffer from observer bias and iden tification error (Cooper et al 2014). However, this has not often been the case and inaccuracies may be out weighed by the size of data sets available from volun teers (Schmeller et al 2009;Ryder et al 2010).…”