scholarly journals Understanding drivers, barriers and information sources for public participation in marine citizen science

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. A02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki Martin ◽  
Les Christidis ◽  
David Lloyd ◽  
Gretta Pecl

Interviews were conducted with 110 marine users to elicit their salient beliefs about recording marine species in a citizen science project. The results showed that many interviewees believe participation would increase knowledge (either scientific, the community's, or their own). While almost half of the interviewees saw no negative outcomes, a small number expressed concerns about targeting of marine species by others, or restrictions on public access to marine sites. Most of the people surveyed (n = 106) emphasised the importance of well-designed technological interfaces to assist their data collection, without which they would be unlikely to engage in the project.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friederike Klan ◽  
Christopher C.M. Kyba ◽  
Nona Schulte-Römer ◽  
Helga U. Kuechly ◽  
Jürgen Oberst ◽  
...  

<p>Data contributed by citizen scientists raise increasing interest in many areas of scientific research. Increasingly, projects rely on information technology such as mobile applications (apps) to facilitate data collection activities by lay people. When developing such smartphone apps, it is essential to account for both the requirements of the scientists interested in acquiring data and the needs of the citizen scientists contributing data. Citizens and participating scientists should therefore ideally work together during the conception, design and testing of mobile applications used in a citizen science project. This will benefit both sides, as both scientists and citizens can bring in their expectations, desires, knowledge, and commitment early on, thereby making better use of the potential of citizen science. Such processes of app co-design are highly transdisciplinary, and thus pose challenges in terms of the diversity of interests, skills, and background knowledge involved.</p><p>Our “Nachtlicht-BüHNE” citizen science project addresses these issues. Its major goal is the development of a co-design process enabling scientists and citizens to jointly develop citizen science projects based on smartphone apps. This includes (1) the conception and development of a mobile application for a specific scientific purpose, (2) the design, planning and organization of field campaigns using the mobile application, and (3) the evaluation of the approach. In Nachtlicht-BüHNE, the co-design approach is developed within the scope of two parallel pilot studies in the environmental and space sciences. Case study 1 deals with the problem of light pollution. Currently, little is known about how much different light source types contribute to emissions from Earth. Within the project, citizens and researchers will develop and use an app to capture information about all types of light sources visible from public streets. Case study 2 focuses on meteors. They are of great scientific interest because their pathways and traces of light can be used to derive dynamic and physical properties of comets and asteroids. Since the surveillance of the sky with cameras is usually incomplete, reports of fireball sightings are important. Within the project, citizens and scientists will create and use the first German-language app that allows reporting meteor sightings.</p><p>We will share our experiences on how researchers and communities of citizen scientists with backgrounds in the geosciences, space research, the social sciences, computer science and other disciplines work together in the Nachtlicht-BüHNE project to co-design mobile applications. We highlight challenges that arose and present different strategies for co-design that evolved within the project accounting for the specific needs and interests of the communities involved.</p>


Author(s):  
Maryam Lotfian ◽  
Jens Ingensand ◽  
Olivier Ertz ◽  
Sarah Composto ◽  
Mathias Oberson ◽  
...  

The public participation in scientific projects (citizen science) is significantly increasing specially with technology developments in recent years. Volunteers play an essential role in citizen science projects, therefore understanding their motivations, and understanding how to sustain them to keep contributing to the project are of utmost importance. This paper presents the analysis of volunteers’ characteristics and their motivations to contribute to a citizen science project, which aims at encouraging citizens to take action for biodiversity. The results from the online survey illustrate that people are more motivated by intrinsic nature-related motives rather than extrinsic motivations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Moskowitz ◽  
Liti Haramaty

National Moth Week is a global citizen science project focusing on moths. During the first National Moth Week, which took place in July 2012, people in over 300 locations worldwide observed and documented the presence of moths in various habitats. This article describes the project’s goals and the methods used to achieve those goals. A summary of outreach activities and data collection is presented.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Lotfian ◽  
Jens Ingensand ◽  
Olivier Ertz ◽  
Sarah Composto ◽  
Mathias Oberson ◽  
...  

The public participation in scientific projects (citizen science) is significantly increasing specially with technology developments in recent years. Volunteers play an essential role in citizen science projects, therefore understanding their motivations, and understanding how to sustain them to keep contributing to the project are of utmost importance. This paper presents the analysis of volunteers’ characteristics and their motivations to contribute to a citizen science project, which aims at encouraging citizens to take action for biodiversity. The results from the online survey illustrate that people are more motivated by intrinsic nature-related motives rather than extrinsic motivations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 251581632110622
Author(s):  
Johannes Drescher ◽  
Tina Katharina Amann ◽  
Charly Gaul ◽  
Peter Kropp ◽  
Yannic Siebenhaar ◽  
...  

Background: The aim of this work is to analyze reports of migraine attacks collected online in the citizen science project CLUE with respect to gender- and migraine type-specific differences in drug effectiveness and pain perception. Citizen science project data collection opens the possibility to examine these differences based on a large number of individual attacks instead of a simple survey of patients. Methods: One thousand three hundred and ninety four participants reported 47,274 migraine attacks via an online platform and smartphone apps. The reports contained information on the acute medications taken, the evaluation of their effect, and information on pain parameters such as pain intensity, origin, and localization. Chi-square tests were used to investigate whether the effect of acute medications and pain parameters differed when collated by gender and migraine type (migraine with and without aura). Results: Our participants rated the effectiveness of triptans as significantly better than that of ibuprofen. For triptans, significant differences in effectiveness were found when migraine types were distinguished, but no difference was found between genders. For ibuprofen, there were no differences between migraine types but significant differences between gender groups. Examination of pain parameters reveals differences between groups in pain intensity, pain origin, and pain location. The differences are statistically significant, but the effects are small. Conclusions: Despite some methodological limitations, web-based data collection is able to support findings from clinical trials in a real-world setting. Due to the high numbers of participants included and attacks reported, even small differences in medication efficacy and pain parameters between the groups considered can be demonstrated to be statistically significant.


Diversity ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 309
Author(s):  
Rhian A. Salmon ◽  
Samuel Rammell ◽  
Myfanwy T. Emeny ◽  
Stephen Hartley

In this paper, we focus on different roles in citizen science projects, and their respective relationships. We propose a tripartite model that recognises not only citizens and scientists, but also an important third role, which we call the ‘enabler’. In doing so, we acknowledge that additional expertise and skillsets are often present in citizen science projects, but are frequently overlooked in associated literature. We interrogate this model by applying it to three case studies and explore how the success and sustainability of a citizen science project requires all roles to be acknowledged and interacting appropriately. In this era of ‘wicked problems’, the nature of science and science communication has become more complex. In order to address critical emerging issues, a greater number of stakeholders are engaging in multi-party partnerships and research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. Within this context, explicitly acknowledging the role and motivations of everyone involved can provide a framework for enhanced project transparency, delivery, evaluation and impact. By adapting our understanding of citizen science to better recognise the complexity of the organisational systems within which they operate, we propose an opportunity to strengthen the collaborative delivery of both valuable scientific research and public engagement.


Author(s):  
Fernanda Beatriz Jordan Rojas Dallaqua ◽  
Fabio Augusto Faria ◽  
Alvaro Luiz Fazenda

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 564-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dick Kasperowski ◽  
Thomas Hillman

In the past decade, some areas of science have begun turning to masses of online volunteers through open calls for generating and classifying very large sets of data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the epistemic culture of a large-scale online citizen science project, the Galaxy Zoo, that turns to volunteers for the classification of images of galaxies. For this task, we chose to apply the concepts of programs and antiprograms to examine the ‘essential tensions’ that arise in relation to the mobilizing values of a citizen science project and the epistemic subjects and cultures that are enacted by its volunteers. Our premise is that these tensions reveal central features of the epistemic subjects and distributed cognition of epistemic cultures in these large-scale citizen science projects.


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