Abstract
Citizen science is an increasingly popular way of undertaking research and simultaneously engaging people with science. However, most emphasis of citizen science in environmental science is on long-term monitoring. Here, we demonstrate the opportunities provided by short-term hypothesis-led citizen science. In 2010, we ran the ‘Conker Tree Science’ project, in which over 3500 people in Great Britain provided data at a national scale of an insect (horse-chestnut leaf-mining moth, Cameraria ohridella) undergoing rapid range-expansion. We addressed two hypotheses, and found that (1) the levels of damage caused to leaves of the horse-chestnut tree, Aesculus hippocastanum, and (2) the level of attack by parasitoids of C. ohridella larvae were both greatest where C. ohridella had been present the longest. Specifically there was a rapid rise in leaf damage during the first three years that C. ohridella was present and only a slight rise thereafter, while estimated rates of parasitism (an index of true rates of parasitism) increased from 1.6 to 5.9% when the time C. ohridella had been present in a location increased from 3 to 6 years. We suggest that this increase is due to recruitment of native generalist parasitoids, rather than the adaptation or host-tracking of more specialized parasitoids, as appears to have occurred elsewhere in Europe. Most data collected by participants were accurate, but the counts of parasitoids from participants showed lower concordance with the counts from experts. We statistically modeled this bias and propagated this through our analyses. Bias-corrected estimates of parasitism were lower than those from the raw data, but the trends were similar in magnitude and significance. With appropriate checks for data quality, and statistically correcting for biases where necessary, hypothesis-led citizen science is a potentially powerful tool for carrying out scientific research across large spatial scales while simultaneously engaging many people with science.
Highlights
In our current age, better engagement between scientists and the public is essential
We considered demographic models of spread to take account of potential under-recording of the distribution of C. ohridella
We found that the number of years that C. ohridella had been present estimated from the modeled distribution assuming two generations per year (Fig. 2B) explained the data better than assuming three generations per year
Summary
Better engagement between scientists and the public is essential. Despite the diversity of citizen science projects, the historical focus of citizen science is often on long-term, large-scale monitoring projects [3,4] Such large-scale projects are beyond the reach of many individual professional researchers because of the large investment required in supporting participants over many years. One rich, but largely untapped, role for citizen science is in participatory, hypothesis-led research [1] Such projects clearly focus on specific hypotheses ( being similar to much grant-led academic research) but testing hypotheses with public involvement gives researchers the opportunity to address questions at larger spatial scales and with greater temporal resolution than might otherwise be feasible; emphasizing citizen science’s valuable role as a research tool [3], with the additional benefits of participatory engagement of the public with science
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