What is citzen science?

Citizen science refers to public participation in scientific research, encouraging amateur scientists to report, collect and categorize biological data. The term amateur scientist refers to anyone without a professional scientific career, however, it does not reflect the level of expertise since many amateurs, based on years of experience, in fact are experts in their fields. Other terms for amateur scientists used in this blog are the general public, volunteers, and citizen scientists. The term public-powered research is used as a synonym for citizen science, abbreviated as CS.

With the attempt to make science more accessible to the public, the UK and the USA were amongst the first to utilize the term citizen science back in the 1990s. According to the organization Scistarter, the number of registered CS projects has experienced a vast increase, from only a couple to several hundred projects in only 10 years of time. Today, thousands of CS projects yield a close collaboration between millions of people of both the public and the scientific community worldwide, covering a range of topics spanning from microbiota to our vast galaxies.

Although CS is sometimes referred to as if it were a recent developed concept, members of the public community have kept record of observations of the natural world for centuries. Prior to science becoming a professionalized field in the late 1900s, virtually all research was conducted by scientific amateurs. It was a common approach for early ecologists, such as Carl Linnaeus, to collect specimens and observations from across the world, collaborating with other non-trained scientists to better understand and systematize the biological world that surrounds us. The current concept of CS, however, has experienced a tremendous development over the past two decades. Integrating straightforward protocols for data collection, data verification routines, and progress evaluations has made it possible to achieve qualitative data collections while educating public members on scientific research. Amongst other, improved methodology has resulted in a high number of scientific reports and peer-reviewed articles. A quick search in the online database “Web of Science” shows that 1247 articles contain the term citizen science in their title, and more than 7000 articles make use of CS as one of their central themes.

According to Miller-Rushing, Primack & Bonney (2012), CS covers major niches within current scientific interests. It enables to deal with ecological questions at scales unfeasible through professional research alone and tackles local problems such as pollution and water quality assessments that lead to management actions. Danielsen and colleagues (2014) addressed the ongoing uncertainty concerning the role of local communities in natural resource monitoring and concluded with that data collection by local volunteers and trained scientists resulted in equally qualitative results, presupposed that collection protocols are well-structured and engaging. These findings emphasize the importance of implementing CS in ongoing scientific research, creating unprecedented opportunities to understanding global-scale patterns and changes in species distributions and biodiversity.

Further reading: 
Scistarter webpage

Bonney, R. et al. (2009) ‘Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy’, BioScience, 59(11), pp. 977–984. doi: 10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9.

Bonney, R. et al. (2014) ‘Next steps for citizen science’, Science, 343(6178), pp. 1436–1437. doi: 10.1126/science.1251554.

Danielsen, F. et al. (2014) ‘A Multicountry Assessment of Tropical Resource Monitoring by Local Communities’, BioScience, 64(3), pp. 236–251. doi: 10.1093/biosci/biu001.

Miller-Rushing, A., Primack, R. and Bonney, R. (2012) ‘The history of public participation in ecological research’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 10(6), pp. 285–290. doi: 10.1890/110278.