The diversity and evolution of ecological and environmental citizen science
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Issue date
2017-04-03Submitted date
2016-07-26Subject Terms
citizen scienceecology and environmental sciences
internet
cell phones
biodiversity
quantitative analysis
spatial and landscape ecology
surveys
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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 (pre1990, 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.Citation
Pocock MJO, Tweddle JC, Savage J, Robinson LD, Roy HE (2017) The diversity and evolution of ecological and environmental citizen science. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0172579. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0172579Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)Journal
PLOS ONEType
Journal ArticleItem Description
Copyright: ©2017 Pocock et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.NHM Repository
EISSN
1932-6203ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1371/journal.pone.0172579
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