Excerpt: Phone-wielding and bare-armed, I follow Scott Edmunds and Mendel Wong to a small park in the Mid-Levels area of Hong Kong Island, where a dengue outbreak occurred last year. We hit the jackpot within five minutes – a swarm of mosquitoes around a tree. With his phone, Wong snaps a picture of one that…
As citizen science methodologies mature and number of participants increases, it is becoming more possible to understand the role and necessity of experts in relation to data quality. This article is a great example of how expertise can be assessed and utilized. — LFF — Summary: Citizen science data are increasingly making valuable contributions to…
Abstract: Citizen science opens new pathways that can complement traditional scientific practice. Intuition and reasoning often make humans more effective than computer algorithms in various realms of problem solving. In particular, a simple visual comparison of spatial patterns is a task where humans are often considered to be more reliable than computer algorithms. However, in…
Editor’s Choice: This article will get your mental wheels turning about identity, power, and the nature of work at disciplinary boundaries. The authors carefully scrutinize words to unpack divergent connotations, examining how positive, neutral, and negative associations influence us. This is a must-read for all who aspire to make “citizen science” a just, inclusive, and…
Excerpt: Scientists expect Africa to be hardest hit by climate change: its dependence on agriculture, hot temperatures, and poor infrastructure mean its citizens are likely to feel the pressure of a changing climate more than most others. But there are big gaps in our knowledge of how ecosystems and microclimates work. “We don’t have an…
Editor’s Choice: This is an excellent example of real “co-created” science between a non-salaried scientist (aka citizen scientist) and salaried scientists. –LFF– Excerpt: Amateur naturalists from the UK have a distinguished pedigree, from Henry Walter Bates and Marianne North, to Alfred Russel Wallace and Mary Anning. But arguably, the rise of post-war academia in the…
Abstract: Reef Check Australia (RCA) has collected data on benthic composition and cover at > 70 sites along > 1000 km of Australia’s Queensland coast from 2002 to 2015. This paper quantifies the accuracy, precision and power of RCA benthic composition data, to guide its application and interpretation. A simulation study established that the inherent…
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…