Affordances and tensions in recording bird observations: how coordinators and volunteers perceive and experience citizen science in birding

Abstract

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.

Bringing Together Species Observations: A Case Story of Sweden’s Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructures

“…As institutions and people come together to do biodiversity informatics, they accrue prestige and recognition that give their efforts meaning and value amongst themselves, their networks, and broader society, which can establish hierarchies and power imbalances. As "data represent power" as well as "emotions and personal meaning" (Lawrence 2010: 262), professional and volunteer work must be cared for and acknowledged to retain participation and address tensions among coordinators and users (Verploegen et al 2021). Most participant-oriented infrastructures recognize that they need to cater to the interests of those who assist their work, but when this data moves to more global contexts, data aggregators must also shoulder accountability for giving back to the institutions and individuals that have freely given over their data as well as account for what types of data compile the dataset.…”