Impacts and Implications of Researcher Identity and Academic Practice: Future Directions for Public Engagement and Ecological Research

Abstract

Citizen science has extensively been reported as a useful tool for scientists gathering large quantities of information (Silvertown et al. 2011; Dickinson et al. 2010; Bonney et al. 2009). Citizen Science has been broadly defined in previous literature. We employ the following for purposes of this paper: partnerships between scientists and the public where data are collected, shared, and analyzed (Jordan et al. 2012). These partnerships result in projects that range in participation capacity, participation design, and project goals. On one hand, there are participatory action research projects (Cooper et al. 2007), initially defined by Caren Cooper as projects initiated by non-scientist members of the public and developed hand-in-hand with scientists or scientists hired by the project as consultants (see also Shirk et al. 2012). On the other hand there are crowdsourced or contributory citizen science projects (Bonney et al. 2009), which allow researchers to gather large amounts of data without any input or participation of the public on project development. These large contributory projects such as eBird (www.eBird.org) and Evolution MegaLab have had success in collecting large-scale data sets from participants for long-term trend analysis in the U.S. and Europe respectively. Crowdsourcing citizen science projects such as FoldIt (www.fold.it) and Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org), have capitalized on large numbers of participants to do analysis that computers are not adept at. Co-created action type citizen science projects represent the middle ground, where partnerships between local citizens and scientists have been successful in preservation and restoration efforts of local waterways in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (e.g., ReClam the Bay (www.reclamthebay.org) and Shermans Creek Conservation (www.shermanscreek.org)). Regardless of the project type, all citizen science programs have participants engaged in authentic scientific research and resulted in successful data collection for scientists. While there is no official count of all the citizen science projects active at any given time, anecdotally there are a large number citizen science projects in ecology. Recent findings on patterns and use of citizen science in research found that the bulk of published citizen science based research was ecological/biological in nature (Follett and Strezov 2015). What has been little studied is the role and impact of the professional scientist who is engaging the citizen scientists. Two areas are of particular interest in this research: (1) who and what disciplines use citizen science and (2) the perceived trust and reliability of citizen science gathered data in academia. Research about the ecologists, and scientists writ-large, engaging participants in their research is limited. It is important to know more about the role and use of citizen science in academia because of its increased use in certain fields not just as a research tool but a method of engagement, and engendering broader support for science within the public sphere. If there is indeed a skewed representation of particular disciplines or individuals, there may be implications for broader citizen science outcomes. Additionally, variation in trust and use, or willingness to use, citizen science or citizen science collected data because of academic practice or identity frames may hinder further gains made in the field of citizen science as * Amanda E. Sorensen amasoren@rutgers.edu