Emerging problems of quality in citizen science

The role of citizen science in research and natural resource monitoring and management is increasing, as evidenced by the growing number of peer-reviewed publications (including a special section in this journal)and calls for involving citizens in monitoring and governance (through, for example, “participatory research”[Danielsen et al. 2014] and “participatory monitoring”[Kennett et al. 2015]). Citizen science projects can be targeted to a specific research question (and thus involve very specific data-collection protocols) or can be more open-ended (giving rise to a need to collect data for which the uses may be unknown or changing)(Wiersma 2010). Advances in online content production and sharing technologies (i.e., Web 2.0), mobile computing, and sensor-equipped devices have contributed to adramatic rise in online citizen science projects, in whichcitizens contribute sightings (e.g., eBird [Sullivan et al.2009]), transcribe data (e.g., Old Weather [Eveleigh et al.2013]), or classify phenomena (e.g., Galaxy Zoo [Hop-kin 2007]). It is these online projects, also referred to as crowdsourcing (Franzoni & Sauermann 2014), which have been the focus of our research and that inform the opinions presented here.

Lukyanenko, R., Parsons, J., and Wiersma, Y. (2016). Emerging problems of quality in citizen science. Conservation Biology. 30 (3), pp. 447–449