Digital citizen science projects differ greatly in their goals and design. Tensions arise when coordinators' design choices and conceptions of citizen science conflict with users' motivations and expectations. In this paper, we use a combination of qualitative methods to gain new insights into the ways citizen science is understood and implemented digitally. This includes a study into the affordances of two citizen science portals for bird observations, and qualitative interviews with users and coordinators of the portals. This reveals tensions related to data sharing, community hierarchies, and communicated expectations. Awareness of these tensions can benefit the future design of online citizen science projects.

A growing group of nature enthusiasts share observations of flora and fauna through participatory online platforms. These ‘citizen science’ data are valuable for research and policy, but the value of these platforms goes beyond this: they provide opportunities to stimulate experiences with nature and remember nature that has been lost. Waarneming.nl is the largest nature observation platform in the Netherlands, with over 70,000 users contributing data on biodiversity through their website and mobile applications. Using Waarneming.nl as an example, the theoretical exploration in this article offers a new lens to look at platforms for nature observations. Users of Waarneming.nl read and write digital traces of encounters with other species, creating a ‘hybrid experience’ of nature, where digital and physical information are intertwined. As physical experiences become scarcer in threatening times of species endangerment and extinction, Waarneming.nl should additionally be understood as a place to memorialize lost nature. By conceptualizing Waarneming.nl as a digital lieu de mémoire (‘place of memories’) and a place where hybrid experiences of nature are inspired, this article reflects on the positive and negative consequences of such platforms for humans and their multispecies relationships.