Abstract
In the last decade, citizen science (CS) has seen a renewed interest from both traditional science and the lay public as testified by a wide number of initiatives, projects, and dedicated technological applications. One of the main reasons for this renewed interest lies in the fact that the ways in which citizen science projects are designed and managed have been significantly improved by the recent advancements in information and communications technologies (ICT), especially in the field of geoinformatics. In this research work, we investigate currently active citizen science projects that involve geoinformation to understand how geoinformatics is actually employed. To achieve this, we define eight activities typically carried out during the implementation of a CS initiative as well as a series of approaches for each activity, in order to pinpoint distinct strategies within the different projects. To this end, a representative set of ongoing CS initiatives is selected and surveyed. The results show how CS projects address the various activities, and report which strategies and technologies from geoinformatics are massively or marginally used. The quantitative results are presented, supported by examples and descriptions. Finally, cues and critical issues coming from the research are discussed.
Highlights
Citizen science (CS) is currently arousing a great deal of interest from both the public and the scientific community
The results of the survey are presented in the form of bar charts and are summarized as frequencies of the different approaches for each activity belonging to the Section 2.1
Of the many projects considered, only a few used geoinformatics solutions to improve recruitment, despite the existence of several already viable and well-known possibilities. An example of such a solution is offered by SciStarter, a geoenabled website acting as a project hub where users can filter the citizen science (CS) projects that are active in their areas of interest
Summary
Citizen science (CS) is currently arousing a great deal of interest from both the public and the scientific community This is due to the unprecedented potential offered to CS by information and communications technologies (ICT), at a more rapid growth rate and at a larger scale than ever before. An investigation of the current state of the application of geoinformatics to CS is necessary to better understand the phenomenon as well as to envisage possible evolutions and challenges. This is the main objective of the present work, and is addressed by (i) defining a representation framework for the analysis of CS projects; (ii) collecting a significant set of CS initiatives; and (iii) examining the sample projects according to the proposed framework. In the following two subsections, we recall the notion of geoinformatics and cite literature dealing with CS characteristics
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