Citizen science comes of age

Abstract

View Large Image | Download PowerPoint SlideCitizen science is booming. Richard Louv describes a ‘new nature movement’ of citizen scientists or naturalists, comprising people from all walks of life, young and old, empowered by access to the Internet. However, what is the history of citizen participation in environmental science and how might that participation look in the future? For professional scientists working in highly competitive and increasingly stressful environments, a more pressing question might be: why do it at all? In other words, how does citizen science fit in with a system measured by the quantity of research produced and of grant income won?Citizen Science: Public Participation in Environmental Research, edited by Janis Dickinson and Rick Bonney, does an excellent job of answering these and many other questions that budding citizen scientists or sceptical researchers might have. Although, at first glance, it appears to be a book summarising decades of citizen science projects emanating solely from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the discoveries made, lessons learned, and potential applications will be of considerable interest to anyone actively involved in citizen science projects across the disciplines. The authors make a convincing argument for why professional scientists should engage with citizen science. First, the data speak for themselves. To date, the US Breeding Bird Survey and Christmas Bird Count (perhaps two of the best-known North American citizen science projects) have resulted in over 500 and 300 publications, respectively. Second, citizen science enables large geographic-scale environmental questions to be asked in new and exciting ways. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology estimate that 200 000 people participate in a suite of bird-monitoring projects across the USA each year. Third, most of the problems associated with data quality can be resolved with good experimental design, adequate training of amateur scientists, ground truthing, and model parameterisation. Fourth, understanding how citizen science affects human understanding and behaviour is an emerging topic in its own right, forging interdisciplinary research between environmental and social scientists.The book is helpfully divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the lessons learned from several citizen science projects in the USA, with a focus on project design, data collection and validation, impacts, and sustainability. This part will be particularly useful for researchers seeking to establish their own citizen science project. Part 2 summarises some of the challenges and opportunities that citizen science presents for conservation research. Included here is a British perspective, describing a century of research by the British Trust for Ornithology, who arguably manage one of the best citizen science data sets in the world. Part 3 focuses on the educational, social, and behavioural aspects of citizen science, with particular reference to teaching children, collective action models using social networking, and an interesting piece on the role for citizen science in disaster, conflict recovery, and resilience.The contributors clearly explain and differentiate between the various goals of citizen science projects (research, education, and stewardship) and the associated trade-offs, and are keen to emphasise that projects should be underpinned by good science, with engagement with professional researchers from the outset. However, the issues surrounding who pays for citizen science, data management, intellectual property rights, and advertising are not explored in as much detail. Large geographic-scale projects can be labour intensive and, thus, costly, and the authors cite examples of projects struggling to expand as a result. Who keeps and manages the data, and whom do they belong to? How can these projects be sufficiently advertised to ensure adequate participation to test the given hypothesis? The Cornell Lab of Ornithology might have a good communications team linked with a variety of media outlets, but how do emerging projects (focusing on less charismatic species) get publicity? My only criticism of the book is that, although these broader points are touched upon, they are not really discussed in depth, which might cause some frustration to readers wishing to establish their own projects.These issues aside, Dickinson and Bonney's book is not only a celebration of the citizen science work developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, but also provides a clear-eyed appraisal of current trends in citizen science more generally, as well as an assessment of future directions and the role of amateur naturalists. As Richard Louv says in the Foreword, ‘the stage is set for the return of the amateur, in a twenty-first century incarnation, as the citizen scientist’.