Citizen science has become a firm feature of established research. The University of Zurich has joined forces with ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva in a call for universally binding guidelines and principles for citizen science. There are laypeople counting birds, characterizing galaxies, identifying invasive plants, and taking measurements of their own bodies. The…
Mapping for Change, the social enterprise that I co-founded, has been assisting community groups to run air quality studies for the past 5 years. During this period we have worked in 30 communities across London, carrying out studies with different tools – from collecting leaves, to examining lichens, to using diffusion tubes. We have also followed…
In the previous post, I described the creation of the Zooniverse Project Success Matrix from Cox et al. (2015). In essence, we examined 17 (well, 18, but more on that below) Zooniverse projects, and for each of them combined 12 quantitative measures of performance into one plot of Public Engagement versus Contribution to Science: Public Engagement…
Abstract: Understanding the influence of landscape change on animal populations is critical to inform biodiversity conservation efforts. A particularly important goal is to understand how urban density affects the persistence of animal populations through time, and how these impacts can be mediated by habitat provision; but data on this question are limited for some taxa….
A starling murmuration is an amazing sight. At their largest you can get millions of birds wheeling about the sky just as the sun starts setting. But it’s a phenomenon we know surprisingly little about. Last year I reported on work by the University of Gloucestershire and The Royal Society of Biology to change all…
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…
Dr Geoffrey Belknap explores ways in which members of the public can produce knowledge and participate in research The questions of how, by whom and where science was done in the Victorian period – the century which brought us ‘modern’ science – is never going to offer straightforward answers. Science, and scientific authority was produced and…
This is a reposting of a guest post on VOLCROWE to Crowdsourcing Week submitted by Dr. Eun Young Oh, a senior research associate at the University of Portsmouth Business School. –LFF VOLCROWE (Volunteer and Crowdsourcing Economics) is a research collaboration between the Universities of Portsmouth, Oxford, Manchester and Leeds, funded by the EPSRC and NEMODE…
Welcome to the First Edition of Citizen Science Today! By Chris Lintott and Lucy Fortson We’re delighted to announce the launch of Citizen Science Today as the latest PressForward publication, presented by the Zooniverse and our friends from the growing community of researchers and practitioners of citizen science. Citizen science – the involvement of non-professionals…
Citizen science is a flexible concept which can be adapted and applied within diverse situations and disciplines. The statements below were developed by the Sharing best practice and building capacity working group of the European Citizen Science Association, led by the Natural History Museum London with input from many members of the Association, to set out some…