How to get citizen science data accepted by the scientific community? Insights from the Plastic Pirates project

Abstract

How to get citizen science data accepted by the scientific community? Insights from the Plastic Pirates projectData resulting from citizen science investigations are often questioned as most participants do not (yet) have a thorough scientific education. This is especially true for projects taking place in schools, and conducting citizen science in this context is further complicated by different motivations of participants and a busy school curriculum. Herein we present strategies to ensure quality of data generated by the citizen science project Plastic Pirates in which schoolchildren investigated litter pollution at and in rivers. We show how formulating concise research questions, offering accompanying educational material, employing data quality mechanisms in the field (photographs, standardized sampling methods and selfevaluation) as well as transparently detailing which datasets were excluded from analysis was vital to accomplish the acceptance of resulting citizen science data by the scientific community.

Addressing data gaps in marine litter distribution: Citizen science observation of plastics in coastal ecosystems by high-school students

“…These, as well as the other outputs of the project (e.g., publications and data) will be open access (Suber, 2012) and compliant to FAIR data guidelines (Wilkinson et al, 2016;Catarino et al, 2021e;Fraisl et al, 2022). It is expected that this approach will allow the project strategy to be widely implemented and followed by youths (Dittmann et al, 2022;Fraisl et al, 2022). Data acquired by citizen scientists is instrumental in obtaining an initial 'snap-shot' of the distribution and abundance of marine litter (Hidalgo-Ruz and Thiel, 2015;GESAMP, 2019;Dittmann et al, 2022;Fraisl et al, 2022) and to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation actions and local environmental policies, such as recycling initiatives (Lippiatt et al, 2013;Harris et al, 2021).…”

“…The technical SOP has been simplified into an illustrated 2-pager to provide accessible guidelines for the citizen scientists (students and schools' staff) (Catarino et al, 2021c), accompanied by animated and subtitled videos (YouTube, shorturl.at/ gyGHP) (Catarino et al, 2021b), all in the four working languages of the project. The simplification of the workflow and guidelines on the technical SOP facilitated the understanding and increased the engagement of COLLECT participants (Dittmann et al, 2022). COLLECT educational resources (illustrated SOP and animated videos) were developed to be easily followed, with step-by-step instructions for visual census, collection, and processing of plastic litter in various size categories.…”

“…It is expected that this approach will allow the project strategy to be widely implemented and followed by youths (Dittmann et al, 2022;Fraisl et al, 2022). Data acquired by citizen scientists is instrumental in obtaining an initial 'snap-shot' of the distribution and abundance of marine litter (Hidalgo-Ruz and Thiel, 2015;GESAMP, 2019;Dittmann et al, 2022;Fraisl et al, 2022) and to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation actions and local environmental policies, such as recycling initiatives (Lippiatt et al, 2013;Harris et al, 2021). We expect that COLLECT will contribute to establishing baseline information on coastal plastic debris and that results will contribute to the identification of hotspots of plastic coastal litter.…”

“…Targeted tasks to engage with project participants and broader audiences were deliberately established throughout COLLECT. Faceto-face interactions between focal points and participants (e.g., information sessions in the classroom, briefings in the field and/or during sample processing at schools) reinforced the bond between the citizen scientists and local researchers, and guaranteed that the students were well informed about the activity to be executed, the project objectives, the importance of investigating plastic pollution and to set the foundation for an engaging and trustworthy collaboration (Rüfenacht et al, 2021;Dittmann et al, 2022;Fraisl et al, 2022). The focal points of the project were crucial in supervising and guaranteeing the quality of the sampling campaigns, in enabling the dataflow between the schools and the researchers, in providing contextualized information to the students and in being an open channel between all researchers participating in the project and the citizen scientists.…”

“…Copies of the datasheets and surveys were compiled by the focal points and sent to the organizers via post/courier or scanned digital copies, and data was compiled manually in Microsoft Excel. Even though this procedure was time consuming, this task was coupled with a data quality check, as per best practices guidelines (Kiessling et al, 2019;Dittmann et al, 2022;Fraisl et al, 2022), enabling expert supervision before data archiving and submission to EMODnet.…”