Abstract
Citizen science—the involvement of volunteers in data collection, analysis and interpretation—simultaneously supports research and public engagement with science, and its profile is rapidly rising. Citizen science represents a diverse range of approaches, but until now this diversity has not been quantitatively explored. We conducted a systematic internet search and discovered 509 environmental and ecological citizen science projects. We scored each project for 32 attributes based on publicly obtainable information and used multiple factor analysis to summarise this variation to assess citizen science approaches. We found that projects varied according to their methodological approach from ‘mass participation’ (e.g. easy participation by anyone anywhere) to ‘systematic monitoring’ (e.g. trained volunteers repeatedly sampling at specific locations). They also varied in complexity from approaches that are ‘simple’ to those that are ‘elaborate’ (e.g. provide lots of support to gather rich, detailed datasets). There was a separate cluster of entirely computer-based projects but, in general, we found that the range of citizen science projects in ecology and the environment showed continuous variation and cannot be neatly categorised into distinct types of activity. While the diversity of projects begun in each time period (pre 1990, 1990–99, 2000–09 and 2010–13) has not increased, we found that projects tended to have become increasingly different from each other as time progressed (possibly due to changing opportunities, including technological innovation). Most projects were still active so consequently we found that the overall diversity of active projects (available for participation) increased as time progressed. Overall, understanding the landscape of citizen science in ecology and the environment (and its change over time) is valuable because it informs the comparative evaluation of the ‘success’ of different citizen science approaches. Comparative evaluation provides an evidence-base to inform the future development of citizen science activities.
Highlights
We expect that the following types of projects may have been under-sampled by our approach: (1) small-scale projects fitting the definition of citizen science not defining themselves as such, (2) projects in non-English speaking communities, (3) projects that do not have websites, (4) projects that have finished, and (5) projects not using the term ‘citizen science’ or ‘volunteer’
We have described the key attributes relating to each of the three main factors in the analysis, allowing us to summarise these axes as the methodological approach and its complexity, Fig 3
The number of projects we discovered via a systematic search compares favourably with a comment in 2012 that deemed 280 projects to “be close to the size of the population” [24] and a recent review of 388 biodiversity citizen science projects discovered through searches of directories of citizen science projects [11]
Summary
Citizen science is the ‘intentional involvement, in a non-professional capacity [i.e. as volunteers], of people in the scientific process. . .’ [1] and it has been rising in profile over the past. The term ‘citizen science’ is one that unifies these many different activities in a single field of practice [27] but in doing so it could be possible to overlook the remarkable diversity of approaches and methods across projects. These approaches are generalizable summaries of how a project was undertaken, and so they are different to why a project was undertaken (its goals and focus) or its success. We expected that, with the growing interest in citizen science, its diversity would have increased over time and so we assessed both its ‘emerging diversity’ (the diversity of projects begun in a specified time period) and its ‘accumulated diversity’ (the diversity of all projects active in each time period, including active projects which were begun in previous time periods)
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