Citizen Science Flashcards
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
Coastwatch Europe
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Coastwatch Europe
Coastwatch Europe is a non-governmental organisation based in Ireland. Founded in the late 1980’s, Coastwatch aims to protect coastal areas by raising public awareness of their value and demonstrating practical ways to save them, and is hence a long-term contributory monitoring project.
The mainstay of Coastwatch is its annual survey in which participants are invited to survey a pre-agreed 500m stretch of coastline, answering a range of questions on their observations in a formal questionnaire, and to submit relevant pictures they may take. Additional testing kits are available for survey coordinators to submit data on environmental parameters.
Participants are directed towards partner projects and supplemental information they may wish to gather at the same time. Survey data can be uploaded online, via an app or by post to the organisers. Pre-survey training events are available to participants and preliminary results are posted online shortly after submission, with subsequent analysis and outcomes posted in due course. Participants are kept up to date with policy and legislative developments via the website and the group’s social media outlets.
Coastwatch actively disseminates its work at conferences, workshops, information days and through regular press releases. The group, and its findings, have had a significant impact on a number of causes including the Irish plastic bag tax, as well as informing a number of scientific publications across Europe. Participants have identified a number of new seagrass beds (Zostera spp.), honeycomb reefs (Sabellaria spp) and other p priority features of conservation interest, translating into engagement and stewardship for the natural environment.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
Plankton net
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Plankton net
Plankton Planet is a recently established and ongoing Citizen Science project initiated by researchers from the CNRS (The National Centre for Scientific Research) in France, together with the Tara-Ocean expedition teams.
The project aims to mobilise citizen sailors, known as ‘Planktonauts,’ to provide continuous samples of plankton from all over the world to biological oceanographers. Planktonauts are asked to assist for a few hours a week. At present, 20 sailing vessels are involved in a preliminary study aiming to improve methods and analyses approaches.
Plankton reacts quickly to changes which may arise through pollution or climate change, or indeed from natural causes. The current lack of understanding of plankton biodiversity and evolution is a barrier to modelling the functioning of the biosphere and hence the prediction of global environmental change. The samples collected will allow for information to be gleaned on current plankton biodiversity and changes over time and space, and therefore enable scientists to predict the evolution of plankton in future ocean conditions.
Participants are provided with free training and are also equipped with sampling equipment and a Planktoscope, a miniature microscope adapted for mobile phones. The participants collect samples and also take images using the microscope and these images are then shared within the Plankton Planet network so that members can identify the organisms present, and hence the nature of the project is contributory to generate new science. The samples are sequenced and all of the results will subsequently be shared with the participants and the public. The aim is to develop long-standing national and international consortia. Around 200 samples have been collected to date and results are currently been checked for quality and bias. A scientific paper is also currently being prepared.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
Recruitment and retention of participants
What are the categories ?
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
- Attention
- Accessibility
- Relevance
- Satisfaction
- Social Impact
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
Recruitment and retention of participants
Attention
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Attention
- This can be done successfully through personal interaction; however it demands a lot of resources and limits the number of volunteers if everyone is addressed one to one.
- Interaction with professional societies (e.g. through water sports associations) or (nongovernmental) organizations can act as a multiplier and is therefore recommended.
- Professional media coverage and prominent or celebrity advocates of Citizen Science projects are other ways of reaching the attention of larger numbers of potential participants.
- The rise in social media platforms can be exploited to provide a relatively simple means of reaching large numbers of potential participants through indirect networks, and using targeted language and handles
- One good strategy can be to have concerted activities (such as Ocean Sampling Day) that activate a higher number of participants on a specific day (or within a short time frame) and therefore help the project to reach media and hence public awareness (e.g. the international Coastal Clean Up project).
- Another possible approach is to have a project linked to a specific location such as a museum or aquarium, where all visitors are also invited to participate.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Recruitment and retention of participants
Accessibility
- The lower the hurdles to participation, the higher the participation, and thus success, rate of Citizen Science projects.
- Prominent examples are recent Citizen Science projects that make use of smart phones and specially designed applications (apps) as their primary approach.
- Websites or printed questionnaires are other examples of low-effort participation - nothing has to be purchased.
- As offshore habitats are inaccessible to most members of the public, coastal and estuarine projects are naturally more common for Citizen Science initiatives (Thiel et al. 2014). Exceptions do however exist, for example in the crowdsourcing of satellite image screening for wreck portions of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, using the Tomnod project platform, or the plankton identification project Plankton Portal on the Zooniverse platform.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Recruitment and retention of participants
Relevance
Relevance
- The willingness to participate in a Citizen Science project depends on the perceived relevance of the topic.
- Regardless of what is required from the participant an initial effort is required, and they are only likely to make this effort if the topic is relevant to them. This can include economic relevance for the individual (water quality monitoring at your waterfront property) or its societal status (contribution to a community effort in marine debris monitoring).
- The benefit has to be clearly defined and highlighted by the project co-ordinators.
- Intertidal rocky shores can present a habitat of relevance given their proximity to the residents of many coastal communities, and thus an integral part of their local landscape.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Recruitment and retention of participants
Satisfaction
Satisfaction
- Communication with the citizen community is crucial to eliminating or minimising dissatisfaction with the project.
- It is important that participating citizens are able to gain a clear picture of why the scientific question should be answered and the expected short-term and long-term impacts that addressing this issue, and hence their contribution, will have.
- While certain projects only require onceoff participation, others benefit from the skills developed as a citizen contributes repeatedly, over time.
- This can be achieved through having clear visibility of their individual contribution to the project, for example through the presentation of collected data and reports.
- Success within the project has to be visible, the status of the project has to evolve, and individual advantages need to be granted.
- The project will benefit from having the participants feeling that they have an ownership of the results and outcomes, and they can see how their contribution fits within the “bigger picture”, why their input is important, and how their results are being used. Engendering ownership of the data and giving due acknowledgement are crucial aspects of successful Citizen Science projects.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Recruitment and retention of participants
Key challenges and opportunities facing citizen science as a whole.
Challenges
- Recognition of the scientific value
- Maintaining scientific rigour and data quality
- Involvement of citizen scientists representing a broad spectrum of society
- Political and financial guarantees for action on findings
Opportunities
- Timely data from disperse sources
- Power to address large knowledge and funding deficits
- Educating the public about environmental policy issues such as biodiversity
- Participatory democracy
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Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Recruitment and retention of participants
Social Impact
Social impact
- The social impacts of Citizen Science, and specifically considering marine-based projects, can be both concrete and “soft”.
- In terms of tangible impacts, these may be felt both by the Citizen Scientists and also other members of the communities and of society who are not directly involved. Examples might include improved preservation of a nature hot-spot following the identification of a new or threatened species of flora or fauna.
- Improved education and changes in behaviours as a result of participation in a Marine Citizen Science project may likewise indirectly impact on the wider community through interaction with the Citizen Scientists (Hartley et al. 2015).
- This means that the positive societal impacts of Marine Citizen Science projects can be felt by a much wider range of people than just the numbers of direct participants, meaning that the benefits may be much more significant than initial assessments within the project may suggest.
- In terms of the “softer”, more intangible social impacts, these can include benefits such as improved community spirit, which again may not have been a specific objective of the project but will, nevertheless, have positive societal impact. This again may benefit both participants and nonparticipants alike.
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
Contribution of Marine Citizen Science to policy evidence gaps
Advancing Citizen Science for Coastal and Ocean Research
European Marine Board Position Paper 23
In the policy context, the value of Marine Citizen Science is derived from this delivery of scientific evidence to inform policy via the significant additional resource. This is especially pertinent given the escalating complexity of marine legislation and the requirements for extensive datasets collected over wide geographical areas to support evidence-based policymaking. As an example, under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), the aim to achieve ‘Good Environmental Status’ (GES), in all EU territorial waters requires data on 29 associated criteria and 56 indicators that include biological, physico-chemical indicators as well as pressure indicators—including hazardous substances, hydrological alterations, litter and noise, and biological disturbance such as introduction of non-indigenous species.
It is therefore understandable that alternative interdisciplinary and costeffective approaches are now being explored with a new degree of prominence by governments, international bodies and funding agencies (e.g. EEA 2013; UNESCO 2013; SEPA 2014).
Reviews by Thiel et al. (2014) and Theobald et al. (2015) demonstrate the breadth of volunteer data and its contribution to our understanding of marine ecology, species distributions, oceanography and coastal geology, and Section 2.2 of this report further details the types of data provisioned by Citizen Science activity. These reviews, however, illustrate that (i) there are fewer studies in marine systems compared to those of terrestrial systems; and (ii) in marine contexts, that there is a bias towards the monitoring of biodiversity (and of charismatic species in particular), relative to other policy-relevant information with fewer studies on resource management or the characterisation of the physical environment.
Data collected by several Marine Citizen Science projects have fed into particular policy goals, providing a contribution to the evidence base. Examples can be found across a wide range of policy themes. The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) beach litter survey (Nelms et al. 2017) was set up to fill an evidence gap on the amount of marine litter in the environment and how it changes over time.
Debates
Citizen science’ is a misnomer, and that involving members of the public in scientific projects can be pleasant and informative for the participants, but is not contributing meaningfully and robustly to furthering scientific knowledge
Main points
- BIas in data collection
- Conflicts of interest
- accountability
Debates
Citizen science’ is a misnomer, and that involving members of the public in scientific projects can be pleasant and informative for the participants, but is not contributing meaningfully and robustly to furthering scientific knowledge
Bias in data collection
- The use of volunteers to collect observational data could lead to data biases both temporal and spatial - volunteers will be more likely to visit locations that have better conditions (e.g. less muddy, close to home) and will visit them only on certain days (i.e. bad weather conditions can make sites inaccessible).
- All volunteers may not receive the same level of training or not enough training so there may be discrepancies in the data collected e.g. in taxonomic identification some species may be identified wrong. This can lead to false positive and false negative data (Conrad and Hilchey, 2011). These are difficult to assess and compensate for.
- Only useful for observational data, bad if data collection requires specialist equipment.
- Often data collected by volunteers is not included in decision-making and scientific reports because of these flaws in data quality. For example, in 1994 the US congress called for the National Biological Survey to excluded data gathered by volunteers as they believed that their ‘environmentalist agenda’ would lead to biased data collection (Root and Alpert, 1994).
- Only 37% of citizen science projects deliver policy relevant evidence so scientists and professionals see citizen science is a waste of time to not get a high delivery rate.(Roy et al., 2012; Hyder et al., 2015)
- Hyder et al (2015) contends that only 14% of marine citizen science projects deliver relevant evidence and as mentioned previously, the lack of training, and bias and flaws in experimental design questions the robustness and validity of the data collected.
Debates
Citizen science’ is a misnomer, and that involving members of the public in scientific projects can be pleasant and informative for the participants, but is not contributing meaningfully and robustly to furthering scientific knowledge
Conflicts of interest
- Conflicts of interest can also undermine research integrity.
- Individuals who engage in citizen science can have biases stemming from their alliances with private, non-profit, and political organizations.
- They may also have biases based on their perceptions of how they or their community might be harmed or benefited by particular findings (Guerrini et al., 2018).
- Advancing political objectives: Opponents of fracking might help to track possible pollution because they want to gather evidence of harmful effects.
- Citizen scientists do not reflect the wider population: CS are more biased.
- Great Koala Count: CS monitored koala populations. Scientists interviewed CS, and results showed that CS had strong views on protection that did not reflect broader public opinion (Hollow et al., 2014).
- CS ranked “Raising awareness” and “Research into disease” as most important factors.
- Public ranked “increasing habitat” and “Reducing car incidents” as more important.
- Overall CS is ‘non-discriminatory’, ‘open to all’. However, that can mean data collectors can be biased.
Debates
Citizen science’ is a misnomer, and that involving members of the public in scientific projects can be pleasant and informative for the participants, but is not contributing meaningfully and robustly to furthering scientific knowledge
Conflicts of interest
Scientist bias and accountability
But, scientists have bias:
- However, scientists and research groups have to declare WHO funded their work, whether their work for-profit, non-profit, or governmental.
- Institutional rules, funding stipulations, regulatory procedures, and professional norms compel scientists to declare any bias.
- There is no format for CS to declare their bias. Screening could be seen as discriminatory and harms the idea that CS is for everyone.
- Logistics in enforcing a “bias screening”. People could easily lie.
Accountability:
- There are ramifications if a scientist has been suspected of misconduct or altered data.
- For example, French plant biologist Olivier Voinnet was suspended from French National Centre for Scientific Research for manipulating data, and has 8 papers retracted for data manipulation.
- There is no framework for reporting misconduct in CS (Rasmussen, 2019).
- It is important to understand the motivations of volunteers to avoid tension between personal and project objectives (Roy et al., 2012)
FOR - citizen science is science
- Data from eBird has been used in at least 90 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Zooniverse projects have yielded more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.
- Particularly useful in ecology which relies on broad-scale research. It is necessary to address ecological questions at scales relevant to species range shifts, patterns of migration, the spread of infectious disease, broad-scale population trends, and impacts of environmental processes such as climate change (Dickinson et al., 2010).
- Good for rare/invasive species as more ground covered
- Pocock et al., 2017, identified that citizen science is valuable for early detection of outbreaks of the Oak processionary moth, and allows appropriate control measures to be put in place.
- Useful in climate change studies and study of animals with large migrations e.g. migratory birds
- Large scale data collection in the UK over a 40 year period since the 1960s on british migratory birds by citizen scientists. Showed the changes in arrival of birds. (Newson et al., 2016)
- Dependent on the ability of citizens to identify species we argue that Increased technology e.g. apps to help in taxonomy/ uploading pictures and other people identifying online or training programmes make this issue easily overcome.
- Adding firsthand experience to education - recent project, SeaCleaner, was designed to collect a large quantity of data as well as raising awareness of marine litter to secondary children who had not previously had education on this topic (Locritani et al, 2019).
