Since the late twentieth century,  “citizen science” has become an increasingly fashionable label for a growing number of participatory research activities. This paper situates the origins and rise of the term “citizen science” and contextualises “citizen science” within the broader history of public participation in science. It analyses critically the current promises — democratisation, education, discoveries — emerging within the “citizen science” discourse and offers a new framework to better understand the diversity of epistemic practices involved in these participatory projects. Finally, it maps a number of historical, political, and social questions for future research in the critical studies of “citizen science”.

The sustainability of agro-ecosystems depends on their ability to deliver an entire package of multiple ecosystem services, rather than provisioning services alone. New social and ecological dimensions of agricultural management must be explored in agricultural landscapes, to foster this ability. We propose a social–ecological framework for the service-based management of agro-ecosystems, specified through an explicit and symmetric representation of the ecosystem and the social system, and the dynamic links between them. It highlights how management practices, with their multiple effects, could drive the provision of multiple services. Based on this framework, we have identified the design of collective multiservice management as a key research issue. It requires innovations in stakeholder organizations and tools to foster synergy between ecosystem functioning and social dynamics, given the complexity and uncertainties of ecological systems

International audienceWe performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the scientific literature on ecosystem services in order to help tracing a research agenda for agricultural sciences. The ecosystem services concept now lies at the heart of current developments to address global environmental change. Do agricultural sciences generate knowledge that covers this emerging theme? An analysis of scientific production allowed us to return to the ecological origins of this concept and see how little it has been appropriated by agricultural sciences until now, despite major focus on the issue of agro-ecosystems in the literature. Agricultural sciences tend to be more active in the field of environmental services, defined as services rendered by humans to ecosystems. The main studied services are those which have already been clearly identified and which act in synergy. Less attention is paid to the antagonisms between different services. These findings call for the implementation of agricultural research programmes that will consider the socio-agro-ecosystem as a whole and broaden the traditional issues addressed by agricultural sciences. We insist on three main management and operational issues that needs to be overcome if this is to be done: working at the landscape scale, increasing inter-disciplinary collaborations and take uncertainties into account

The recent literature is rich in papers sounding the alarm about taxonomy. We analyzed data from the Zoological Record (1864–2010 and 1978–2010) to show that we cannot speak of a decline. The number of authors describing new species is growing, along with the number of articles describing new species and the number of new species. We also observed a growing interdisciplinarity and a change in the number of species described per author, suggesting that taxonomy is experiencing new ways of doing research. The modalities of these changes remain to be explored. It is therefore more pertinent to speak not of a decline, i.e. of a degradation relative to a previous situation, but of inadequacy relative to its objective, namely the scientific inventory and classification of the planet's living taxa.