One of the wonderful things about citizen science is the innate coupling of science research with science education – learning while doing. But does this equation actually hold up? This article reviews four citizen science categories in the context of whether public understanding of science is obtained and comes to the conclusion that while there are many…

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Here we have a real existential crisis – one that those of us in the field grapple with continuously – a search for the true meaning of the term  “citizen science”. This term has different meanings to various stakeholders, but to accurately track the contributions that are being made academically (and otherwise) by various forms…

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An article published in PLOS One tracking academic papers mentioning ‘citizen science’ caused a lot of discussion in the last month. My take is here, but Caren Cooper’s blog does a much better job of exploring the issues. –CJL Citizen science is skyrocketing in popularity. Not just among participants (of which there are millions), but…

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This paper from the ever-prolific Cornell Lab of Ornithology team describes the creation of a new dataset of annotated images. Those interested in volunteer citizen science might be interested in another conclusion: We find that citizen scientists are significantly more accurate than Mechanical Turkers at zero cost. –CJL Abstract: We introduce tools and methodologies to…

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The arrival of ‘ash dieback’ in 2012, a fatal disease that aggressively infects trees, in the UK was big news, and generated a range of citizen science responses. This thoughtful article, from Judith Tsouvalis at the University of Nottingham, looks at the sometimes awkward relationship of such programs with language used by those concentrating on…

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This is what I love about citizen science. Because of its distributed nature, the sorts of questions that can be tackled are as varied as the multitude of ways in which humans commonly interact with the world around them. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we can use citizen science to gather data on the behavior…

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In honor of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference; the critical role that citizen science can play in understanding and mitigating the effects of climate change. – LFF    Climate change is a very real problem facing our planet. The term “climate change” can cover a great many things, some natural and some man…

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We’re all used to citizen science projects that aim at education, or at producing scientific value, but the combination – especially involving groups of young children – remains incredibly difficult to pull off. The ‘Blackawton Bees’ study is a touchstone for much of my thinking, but hasn’t been replicated in the UK and required a…

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I thought this post significant as I personally found the idea of discovering multiple new species – even if they are flies – in a heavily urbanized area such as Los Angeles to be astonishing. – LFF   The latest buzz in the world of newly discovered insects was not in a distant jungle far away but…

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The true potential of citizen science comes through in this article –  the power to change the world when combining “traditional” scientific methods with data generated through citizen science. This is a call to arm the farmers of Africa with a citizen science network that would help them learn about and maintain the health of soils. – LFF…

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