Citizen Science Sketch

This month, we had two great presentations from Robin Hutchinson (UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, robhut@ceh.ac.uk) and Clare Betts (Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, clare.betts@defra.gov.uk) on citizen science data, all the way from the data collection stage to using these datasets for government environmental indicators:

  • Citizen science involves public volunteers at some stage of science and research, from project design to data collection to dissemination
    • For environmental sciences, this is often using volunteers to record where and when they observe a particular species
  • Citizen science data can have a range of underlying structure, depending on the methodology provided (or lack thereof)
  • Indicators (e.g. species abundance indicator can combine data for >1,000 species – massive challenge when each dataset will have different biases, formats, time periods etc.
  • There are a lot of subjective choices in creating these indicators (e.g. how to smooth data, how many species of different groups to include, how to define biodiversity) that can reverse the direction of trends