Abstract
Citizen science is the involvement of citizens, such as farmers, in the research process. Citizen science has become increasingly popular recently, supported by the proliferation of mobile communication technologies such as smartphones. However, citizen science methodologies have not yet been widely adopted in agricultural research. Here, we conducted an online survey with 57 British and French farmers in 2014. We investigated (1) farmer ownership and use of smartphone technologies, (2) farmer use of farm-specific management apps, and (3) farmer interest and willingness to participate in agricultural citizen science projects. Our results show that 89 % respondents owned a smartphone, 84 % used it for farm management, and 72 % used it on a daily basis. Fifty-nine percent engaged with farm-specific apps, using on average four apps. Ninety-three percent respondents agreed that citizen science was a useful methodology for data collection, 93 % for real-time monitoring, 83 % for identification of research questions, 72 % for experimental work, and 72 % for wildlife recording. Farmers also showed strong interest to participate in citizen science projects, often willing to commit substantial amounts of time. For example, 54 % of British respondents were willing to participate in farmland wildlife recording once a week or monthly. Although financial support was not always regarded as necessary, experimental work was the most likely activity for which respondents thought financial support would be essential. Overall, this is the first study to quantify and explore farmers’ use of smartphones for farm management, and document strong support for farm-based citizen science projects.
Highlights
Non-professional people have participated in scientific research for several centuries, often contributing profound subject knowledge (Silvertown 2009; Pescott et al 2015)
Smartphone technologies offer great potential for participatory agricultural research and large scale data collection, and our results indicate that farmers have sufficient access to and knowledge of the technology, as well as enthusiasm for citizen science participation, providing a basis for the wider application in future participatory research projects
This paper presents data about the use of smartphone technology amongst European farmers, focusing on the British and French farming sector enabling us to contribute to the relatively small pool of evidence about the extent of smartphone use amongst farmers
Summary
Non-professional people (lay persons/amateurs/volunteers) have participated in scientific research for several centuries, often contributing profound subject knowledge (Silvertown 2009; Pescott et al 2015). The involvement of volunteers in research is commonly referred to as “citizen science”, with recent years seeing a rapid increase in the number of citizen science initiatives available globally, in Europe and North America (Silvertown 2009). Recent advances in digital information and communication technologies have enabled much wider participation in citizen science, to include people that may not possess any, or only limited, background knowledge of the studied subjects, but are willing to contribute by collecting data (Adriaens et al 2015; Graham et al 2011; August et al 2015).
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