Abstract: CoCoRaHS is a multinational citizen science project for observing precipitation. Like many citizen science projects, volunteer retention is a key measure of engagement and data quality. Through survival analysis, we found that participant age (self-reported at account creation) is a significant predictor of retention. Compared to all other age groups, participants aged 60-70 are…
Excerpt: In the Education Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we’re always working to bring exciting scientific content to K-12 classrooms. Educators can access many of these free resources, classroom materials and activities online, and we’re adding more all the time. The inspiration for these products often comes from the work being done at JPL…
Excerpt: In 1977, in the very heavenly dawn of London’s punk-rock scene, a crude, photocopied magazine told its readers: “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now start a band.” They did so by the thousand. Now that punk aesthetic has come to science. Citizen science has been around for ages—professional…
Excerpt: Darcy Reynard hates “beg buttons” so much, he created an online map and recruited Twitter users to use a stop-watch on pedestrian crossing signals across the city. The map was soon reporting waits of more than three minutes as pedestrians or cyclists shivered in the cold, missed their bus or gave up and jaywalked….
Excerpt: Until recently, much mapping activity was in the exclusive realm of authoritative agencies but technological development has also allowed the rise of the amateur mapping community. The proliferation of inexpensive and highly mobile and location aware devices together with Web 2.0 technology have fostered the emergence of the citizen as a source of data….
Editor’s Choice: The focus of this paper is a summary of two workshops held to better understand the design and development principles for mobile or web-based citizen science platforms. The recommendations from the working groups are well worth reading – even if you think you know everything about developing citizen science projects! – LFF Abstract:…
Editor’s Choice: This paper points out that there is an oft-overlooked category of people interacting with citizen science projects – people who do not contribute to the data collection, but who nonetheless consume data and information related to the project. The questions are then posed – do these data consumers share the same characteristics as…
Abstract: As global warming worsens, addressing environmental health disparities and justice is increasingly important. This necessity is evident in southern metropolitan Tucson, Arizona, an area underserved and disproportionately experiencing the effects of climate change. Including underserved groups in problem solving can spur knowledge generation and the building of community capacity to address and mitigate environmental…
Abstract: Citizen science is a rapidly developing research approach, increasing in popularity within the science community and civil society, as well as in the media and among policy-makers (Pettibone et al., 2017). Various attempts to define citizen science have been made (e.g. Irwin, 1995; Bonney et al., 2009; Wiggins & Crowston, 2011; Shirk et al.,…
Abstract: Information on species’ distributions and abundances, environmental associations, and how these change over time are central to the study and conservation of wildlife populations. This information is challenging to obtain at relevant scales across range-wide extents for two main reasons. First, local and regional processes that affect populations vary throughout the year and across…