Citizen Science Website Research Articles

GeoExposures: Documenting temporary geological exposures in Great Britain through a citizen-science web site

GeoExposures is a newly developed crowd-sourcing web site for recording temporary geological exposures in Great Britain that might be lost to science. It has been developed and deployed by the British Geological Survey (BGS) using the Ushahidi Crowdmap service. Geological site information can be recorded and uploaded using a smartphone or via a personal computer to the common-access web site. Geological data is recorded using a pro-forma and is uploaded along with digital photographs. Support is provided through linked web sites including Google Maps, BGS digital geological maps, the BGS Stratigraphical Lexicon and BGS TimeChart (geochronology). As a contribution to citizen science, GeoExposures will enable the geoscience community to contribute to recording and preserving important geological information. GeoExposures is made available under a Creative Commons licence. As with other citizen science initiatives, the information and photographic records are available to the community and copyright is not vested with the individual respondent or the BGS.

Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers

The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this paper, we present results of a pilot study into the motivations and demographics of Galaxy Zoo volunteers, and define a technique to determine motivations from free responses that can be used in larger multiple-choice surveys with similar populations. Our categories form the basis for a future survey, with the goal of determining the prevalence of each motivation.

User-friendly web mapping: lessons from a citizen science website

Citizen science websites are emerging as a common way for volunteers to collect and report geographic ecological data. Engaging the public in citizen science is challenging and, when involving online participation, data entry, and map use, becomes even more daunting. Given these new challenges, citizen science websites must be easy to use, result in positive overall satisfaction for many different users, support many different tasks, and ensure data quality. To begin reaching these goals, we built a geospatially enabled citizen science website, evaluated its usability, and gained experience by working with and listening to citizens using the website. We sought to determine general perceptions, discover potential problems, and iteratively improve website features. Although the website was rated positively overall, map-based tasks identified a wide range of problems. Given our results, we redesigned the website, improved the content, enhanced the ease of use, simplified the map interface, and added features. We discuss citizen science websites in relation to online Public Participation Geographic Information Systems, examine the role(s) websites may play in the citizen science research model, discuss how citizen science research advances GIScience, and offer guidelines to improve citizen-based web mapping applications.