Agricultural workers have long been collecting data on the natural world, but opening up opportunities for farmers to share information raises questions about who would participate and why. This study is unusual for involving farmers in developing countries as potential stakeholders in citizen science, for whom participation may be meaningfully connected to livelihood. While most farmers…
Abstract: Data collection, storage, analysis, visualization, and dissemination are changing rapidly due to advances in new technologies driven by computer science and universal access to the internet. These technologies and web connections place human observers front and center in citizen science-driven research and are critical in generating new discoveries and innovation in such fields as…
Abstract: Citizen participation in online communities of scientific investigations has recently become more popular. Enhancing the engagement of citizens within these communities is a focus of attention for researchers and practitioners who want to amplify the impact on learning, science and society. This study investigates the relationship between engagement factors and behaviour patterns in an…
Abstract: The validity of the threat status assigned to a species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List relies heavily on the accuracy of the geographic range size estimate for that species. Range maps used to assess threat status often contain large areas of unsuitable habitat, thereby overestimating range and underestimating…
Abstract: Changing land cover and climate regimes modify water quantity and quality in natural stream systems. In regions undergoing rapid change, it is difficult to effectively monitor and quantify these impacts at local to regional scales. In Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the most rapidly urbanizing areas in Canada, 750 measurements were taken from a…
Abstract: Despite the growing volume of available transportation data and the efforts of many cities to increase cycling levels, there remains a lack of data on where people cycle. The use of GPS trajectories have now been used in cycle studies for several years, and more recently large, crowdsourced datasets of GPS recorded cycle trips…
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…
Abstract: Life history trait analyses of non-native fishes help identify how novel populations respond to different habitat typologies. Here, using electric fishing and anglers as citizen scientists, scales were collected from the invasive barbel Barbus barbus population from four reaches of the River Severn and Teme, western England. Angler samples were biased towards larger fish,…
Summary: 1.Protected areas are the cornerstone of global conservation, yet financial support for basic monitoring infrastructure is lacking in 60% of them. Citizen science holds potential to address these shortcomings in wildlife monitoring, particularly for resource-limited conservation initiatives in developing countries – if we can account for the reliability of data produced by volunteer citizen…
Abstract: With around 3,200 tigers (Panthera tigris) left in the wild, the governments of 13 tiger range countries recently declared that there is a need for innovation to aid tiger research and conservation. In response to this call, we created the “Think for Tigers” study to explore whether crowdsourcing has the potential to innovate the…