Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy

Bonney, Rick; Cooper, Caren B.; Dickinson, Janis L.; Kelling, Steve; Phillips, Tina; Rosenberg, Kenneth V.; Shirk, Jennifer

doi:10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9

Cited by 1,921 publications

(1,633 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Citizen science efforts, however, can have many levels of Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene • 4: 000115 • doi: 10.12952/journal.elementa.000115 participation from passive engagement (providing information) to collective action (acting together) (Kindon et al, 2007). Many scientific projects now rely on citizens to report their observations of animal movements, tree diseases, weather, and other phenomena (Bonney et al, 2009). "Crowdsourcing" data and using distributed networks of citizen-operated computers are also rapidly becoming popular in sciences from astronomy to biology (Kitchin, 2013).…”

Section: Civic Validation: Remaking Societal Norms Of Legitimacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology

Wit

Iles

2016

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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Legitimacy is at the heart of knowledge politics surrounding agriculture and food. When people accept industrial food practices as credible and authoritative, they are consenting to their use and existence. With their thick legitimacy, industrial food systems paralyze the growth of alternative agricultures, including agroecology. Questions of how alternative agricultures can attain their own thick legitimacy in order to compete with, and displace, that of industrial food have not yet attracted much scrutiny. We show that both agroecological and scientific legitimacy grow out of a web of legitimation processes in the scientific, policy, political, legal, practice, and civic arenas. Crucially, legitimation often comes through meeting what we call 'credibility tests'. Agroecologists can learn to navigate these co-constituted, multiple bases of legitimacy by paying attention to how credibility tests are currently being set in each arena, and beginning to recalibrate these tests to open more room for agroecology. Using a schematic of three non-exclusive pathways, we explore some possible practical interventions that agroecologists and other advocates of alternative agricultures could take. These pathways include: leveraging, while also reshaping, the existing standards and practices of science; extending influence into policy, legal, practical, and civic arenas; and centering attention on the ethical legitimacy of food systems. We conclude that agroecologists can benefit from considering how to build legitimacy for their work.

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Section: Civic Validation: Remaking Societal Norms Of Legitimacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology

Wit

Iles

2016

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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“…This would create vast quantities of ecological and spatial data that could be utilised in research which tracks individuals. However, despite this, citizen science projects are often limited to: (1) informal education activities or outreach to promote understanding [1,6,14,24,25]; (2) natural resource monitoring to promote stewardship [26][27][28]; (3) to promote social activities and action [29,30]; (4) purely virtual whereby the entire project is ICT-mediated with no physical attribute (e.g., classifying photographs) ( [31,32], see Table 1). Table 2 provides examples of citizen science projects alongside their primary goals.…”

Section: International Journal Of Zoologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Few scientific investigative projects exist in ecology or biology using these new technologies for data collection, and where they do, they often encounter difficulties with gaining robust data [5,6]. Even less take advantage of the rapidly increasing and evolving capabilities of Web 2.0 and social networks such as Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/), Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/) and Flickr (http://www.fli ckr.com/), through which millions of people upload and share photographs and location data, many citizen science studies also concentrate on data being collected within a very rigid framework, very similar to previous volunteer data collection whereby paper forms are replaced by online submission forms (examples include e-bird, Project Budburst, What's Invasive, and Neighbourhood Nestwatch Program).…”

Section: International Journal Of Zoologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within the past two decades, use of volunteers in research has begun to proliferate and evolve into the current form of "citizen science" [6,7]. Citizen science, a term first coined by Irwin [7], is used to describe a form of research collaboration or data gathering that is performed by untrained or "nonexpert" individuals, often involving members of the public, and frequently thought of as a form of crowd-sourcing [1,[8][9][10][11][12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Citizen science will usually incorporate an element of public education [2,6,[13][14][15]. Silvertown [5] described the differentiation between historical and modern forms of citizen science by potential for it to be "available to all, not just a privileged few."…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Citizen Science Landscape: From Volunteers to Citizen Sensors and Beyond

Catlin-Groves

2012

International Journal of Zoology

108

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Within conservation and ecology, volunteer participation has always been an important component of research. Within the past two decades, this use of volunteers in research has proliferated and evolved into "citizen science." Technologies are evolving rapidly. Mobile phone technologies and the emergence and uptake of high-speed Web-capable smart phones with GPS and data upload capabilities can allow instant collection and transmission of data. This is frequently used within everyday life particularly on social networking sites. Embedded sensors allow researchers to validate GPS and image data and are now affordable and regularly used by citizens. With the "perfect storm" of technology, data upload, and social networks, citizen science represents a powerful tool. This paper establishes the current state of citizen science within scientific literature, examines underlying themes, explores further possibilities for utilising citizen science within ecology, biodiversity, and biology, and identifies possible directions for further research. The paper highlights (1) lack of trust in the scientific community about the reliability of citizen science data, (2) the move from standardised data collection methods to data mining available datasets, and (3) the blurring of the line between citizen science and citizen sensors and the need to further explore online social networks for data collection.

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Species data for understanding biodiversity dynamics: The what, where and when of species occurrence data collection

Petersen

Speed

Grøtan

et al. 2021

Ecol Sol and Evidence

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1. The availability and quantity of observational species occurrence records have greatly increased due to technological advancements and the rise of online portals, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), coalescing occurrence records from multiple datasets. It is well-established that such records are biased in time, space and taxonomy, but whether these datasets differ in relation to origin have not been assessed. If biases are specific to different types of datasets, and the relative contribution from these datasets have changed over time, these shifting biases will have implications for interpretations of results and, consequentially, for management and conservation measures. 2. We examined observational GBIF records from Norway to test potential differences in taxonomic, time and land-cover biases between 10 different datasets, with a focus on red-listed and non-native species. 3. The datasets differ in their taxonomic coverage, with datasets dominated by citizen scientist recorders focusing greatly on birds. The number of records has increased over time; in particular, citizen science datasets have had a sharp increase in recent years. 4. The different datasets (including division of the datasets by conservation status) showed differences in geographical coverage. Anthropogenic land covers have more records than would be expected by chance in the majority of cases. Remote areas have fewer records than would be expected, underlining the prevalence of a roadside bias. 5. Accounting for biases in opportunistic species occurrence records need to be a dynamic rather than static process, as the taxonomic and geographical biases have changed over time and differ between datasets, depending on origin and inherent characteristics. Data-collection programmes should be designed to counteract the biases of the specific datasets, and methods to account for the biases in existing data should be developed. When utilizing compiled, open-source data, care must be taken to ensure complementarity between the datasets, both regarding time and space. Incorporating strengths and accounting for biases between datasets can strengthen the integration This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy

Cited by 1,921 publications

References 26 publications

Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology

Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology

The Citizen Science Landscape: From Volunteers to Citizen Sensors and Beyond

Species data for understanding biodiversity dynamics: The what, where and when of species occurrence data collection

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