Citizen science


Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur scientists. Citizen science is sometimes described as "public participation in scientific research," participatory monitoring, and participatory action research whose outcomes are often advancements in scientific research, as well as an increase in the public's understanding of science. Based on Alexa rankings iNaturalist is currently the most popular citizen science website followed by eBird and then Zooniverse in second and third place respectively.
for mountain goats as part of the Glacier National Park Citizen Science Program

Definition

The term CS has multiple origins, as well as differing concepts. It was first defined independently in the mid-1990s by Rick Bonney in the United States and Alan Irwin in the United Kingdom. Alan Irwin, a British sociologist, defines CS as "developing concepts of scientific citizenship which foregrounds the necessity of opening up science and science policy processes to the public". Irwin sought to reclaim two dimensions of the relationship between citizens and science: 1) that science should be responsive to citizens' concerns and needs; and 2) that citizens themselves could produce reliable scientific knowledge. The American ornithologist Rick Bonney, unaware of Irwin's work, defined CS as projects in which nonscientists, such as amateur birdwatchers, voluntarily contributed scientific data. This describes a more limited role for citizens in scientific research than Irwin's conception of the term.
The terms citizen science and citizen scientists entered the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014. "Citizen science" is defined as "scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions". "Citizen scientist" is defined as: "a scientist whose work is characterized by a sense of responsibility to serve the best interests of the wider community "; or "a member of the general public who engages in scientific work, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions; an amateur scientist". The first use of the term "citizen scientist" can be found in the magazine New Scientist in an article about ufology from October 1979.
Muki Haklay cites, from a policy report for the Wilson Center entitled "Citizen Science and Policy: A European Perspective", an alternate first use of the term "citizen science" by R. Kerson in the magazine MIT Technology Review from January 1989. Quoting from the Wilson Center report: "The new form of engagement in science received the name 'citizen science'. The first recorded example of the use of the term is from 1989, describing how 225 volunteers across the US collected rain samples to assist the Audubon Society in an acid-rain awareness raising campaign."
A "Green Paper on Citizen Science" was published in 2013 by the European Commission's Digital Science Unit and Socientize.eu, which included a definition for CS, referring to "the general public engagement in scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge or with their tools and resources. Participants provide experimental data and facilities for researchers, raise new questions and co-create a new scientific culture."
Citizen science may be performed by individuals, teams, or networks of volunteers. Citizen scientists often partner with professional scientists to achieve common goals. Large volunteer networks often allow scientists to accomplish tasks that would be too expensive or time-consuming to accomplish through other means.
Many citizen-science projects serve education and outreach goals. These projects may be designed for a formal classroom environment or an informal education environment such as museums.
Citizen science has evolved over the past four decades. Recent projects place more emphasis on scientifically sound practices and measurable goals for public education. Modern citizen science differs from its historical forms primarily in the access for, and subsequent scale of, public participation; technology is credited as one of the main drivers of the recent explosion of citizen science activity.
In March 2015, the Office of Science and Technology Policy published a factsheet entitled "Empowering Students and Others through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing". Quoting: "Citizen science and crowdsourcing projects are powerful tools for providing students with skills needed to excel in science, technology, engineering, and math. Volunteers in citizen science, for example, gain hands-on experience doing real science, and in many cases take that learning outside of the traditional classroom setting".
In May 2016, a new open-access journal was started by the Citizen Science Association along with Ubiquity Press called Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. Quoting from the editorial article titled "The Theory and Practice of Citizen Science: Launching a New Journal", "CS:T&P provides the space to enhance the quality and impact of citizen science efforts by deeply exploring the citizen science concept in all its forms and across disciplines. By examining, critiquing, and sharing findings across a variety of citizen science endeavors, we can dig into the underpinnings and assumptions of citizen science and critically analyze its practice and outcomes."

Alternative definitions

Other definitions for citizen science have also been proposed. For example, Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University's Communication and S&TS departments describes 3 possible definitions:
Scientists and scholars who have used other definitions include Frank N. von Hippel, Stephen Schneider, Neal Lane and Jon Beckwith. Other alternative terminologies proposed are "civic science" and "civic scientist".
Further, Muki Haklay offers an overview of the typologies of the level of citizen participation in citizen science, which range from "crowdsourcing", where the citizen acts as a sensor, to "distributed intelligence", where the citizen acts as a basic interpreter, to "participatory science", where citizens contribute to problem definition and data collection, to "extreme citizen science", which involves collaboration between the citizen and scientists in problem definition, collection and data analysis.
A 2014 Mashable article defines a citizen scientist as: "Anybody who voluntarily contributes his or her time and resources toward scientific research in partnership with professional scientists."
In 2016 the Australian Citizen Science Association released their definition which states "Citizen science involves public participation and collaboration in scientific research with the aim to increase scientific knowledge."
In 2016, the book "Analyzing the Role of Citizen Science in Modern Research" defined citizen science as "work undertaken by civic educators together with citizen communities to advance science, foster a broad scientific mentality, and/or encourage democratic engagement, which allows society to deal rationally with complex modern problems".

Related fields

In a Smart City era, Citizen Science relays on various web-based tools and becomes Cyber Citizen Science. Some projects, such as SETI@home, use the Internet to take advantage of distributed computing. These projects are generally passive. Computation tasks are performed by volunteers' computers and require little involvement beyond initial setup. There is disagreement as to whether these projects should be classified as citizen science.
The astrophysicist and Galaxy Zoo co-founder Kevin Schawinski stated: "We prefer to call this citizen science because it's a better description of what you're doing; you're a regular citizen but you're doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, well, you're just a member of the crowd and you're not; you're our collaborator. You're pro-actively involved in the process of science by participating."
Compared to SETI@home, "Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work. They're not just passively running something on their computer and hoping that they'll be the first person to find aliens. They have a stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now interested in what we do with it, and what we find."
Citizen policy may be another result of citizen science initiatives. Bethany Brookshire writes: "If citizens are going to live with the benefits or potential consequences of science, it's incredibly important to make sure that they are not only well informed about changes and advances in science and technology, but that they also... are able to... influence the science policy decisions that could impact their lives."

Benefits and limitations

Citizen involvement in scientific projects has become a means of encouraging curiosity and greater understanding of science whilst providing an unprecedented engagement between professional scientists and the general public. In a research report published by the National Park Service in 2008, Brett Amy Thelen and Rachel K. Thiet mention the following concerns, previously reported in the literature, about the validity of volunteer-generated data:
The question of data accuracy, in particular, remains open. John Losey, who created the Lost Ladybug citizen science project, has argued that the cost-effectiveness of citizen science data can outweigh data quality issues, if properly managed.
In December 2016, authors M. Kosmala, A. Wiggins, A. Swanson and B. Simmons published a study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment called "Assessing Data Quality in Citizen Science". The abstract describes how ecological and environmental CS projects have enormous potential to advance science. Also, CS projects can influence policy and guide resource management by producing datasets that are otherwise infeasible to generate. In the section "In a Nutshell", four condensed conclusions are stated. They are:
They conclude that as CS continues to grow and mature, a key metric of project success they expect to see will be a growing awareness of data quality. They also conclude that CS will emerge as a general tool helping "to collect otherwise unobtainable high-quality data in support of policy and resource management, conservation monitoring, and basic science."
A study of Canadian lepidoptera datasets published in 2018 compared the use of a professionally curated dataset of butterfly specimen records with four years of data from a CS program, eButterfly. The eButterfly dataset was used as it was determined to be of high quality because of the expert vetting process used on the site, and there existed a historic dataset covering the same geographic area consisting of specimen data, much of it institutional. The authors note that, in this case, CS data provides both novel and complementary information to the specimen data. Five new species were reported from the CS data, and geographic distribution information was improved for over 80% of species in the combined dataset when CS data was included.

Law

In March 2015, the state of Wyoming passed new laws clarifying that trespassing laws applied even if the trespasser's intention was to gather data to further a U.S. government science program. This hampered some CS researchers who were collecting data while on other people's land.

Ethics

Various studies have been published that explore the ethics of CS, including issues such as intellectual property and project design. The Citizen Science Association, based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the European Citizen Science Association, based in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, have working groups on ethics and principles.
In September 2015, the European Citizen Science Association published its Ten Principles of Citizen Science, which have been developed by the "Sharing best practice and building capacity" working group of the ECSA, led by the Natural History Museum, London with input from many members of the association.
The medical ethics of internet crowdsourcing has been questioned by Graber & Graber in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In particular, they analyse the effect of games and the crowdsourcing project Foldit. They conclude: "games can have possible adverse effects, and that they manipulate the user into participation".
In March 2019 the online journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice launched a collection of articles
on the theme of Ethical Issues in Citizen Science. The articles are introduced with : "Citizen science can challenge existing ethical norms because it falls outside of customary methods of ensuring that research is conducted ethically. What ethical issues arise when engaging the public in research? How have these issues been addressed, and how should they be addressed in the future?"
In June 2019, published an issue titled "Citizen Science: Practices and Problems" which contains 15 articles/studies on CS, including many relevant subjects of which ethics is one. Quoting from the introduction Citizen, Science, and Citizen Science: "The term citizen science has become very popular among scholars as well as the general public, and, given its growing presence in East Asia, it is perhaps not a moment too soon to have a special issue of EASTS on the topic."

Economic worth

In the research paper "Can citizen science enhance public understanding of science?" by Bonney et al. 2016, statistics which analyse the economic worth of citizen science are used, drawn from two papers: i)Sauermann and Franzoni 2015, and
ii)Theobald et al. 2015. In "Crowd science user contribution patterns and their implications" by Sauermann and Franzoni, seven projects from the Zooniverse web portal are used to estimate the monetary value of the CS that had taken place. The 7 projects are: Solar Stormwatch, Galaxy Zoo Supernovae, Galaxy Zoo Hubble, Moon Zoo, Old Weather, The Milky Way Project and Planet Hunters. Using data from 180 days in 2010, they find a total of 100,386 users participated, contributing 129,540 hours of unpaid work. Estimating at a rate of $12 an hour, the total contributions amount to $1,554,474, an average of $222,068 per project. The range over the 7 projects was from $22,717 to $654,130.
In "Global change and local solutions: Tapping the unrealized potential of citizen science for biodiversity research" by Theobald et al. 2015, the authors surveyed 388 unique biodiversity-based projects. Quoting: "We estimate that between 1.36 million and 2.28 million people volunteer annually in the 388 projects we surveyed, though variation is great" and that "the range of in-kind contribution of the volunteerism in our 388 citizen science projects as between $667 million to $2.5 billion annually."
Worldwide participation in citizen science continues to grow. A list of the top five citizen science communities compiled by Marc Kuchner and Kristen Erickson in July 2018 shows a total of 3.75 million participants, although there is likely substantial overlap between the communities.

Education

There have been studies published which examine the place of CS within education. Teaching aids can include books and activity or lesson plans.. Some examples of studies are:
From the Second International Handbook of Science Education, a chapter entitled: "Citizen Science, Ecojustice, and Science Education: Rethinking an Education from Nowhere" by Mueller and Tippins, acknowledges in the abstract that: "There is an emerging emphasis in science education on engaging youth in citizen science." The authors also ask: "whether citizen science goes further with respect to citizen development." The abstract ends by stating that the "chapter takes account of the ways educators will collaborate with members of the community to effectively guide decisions, which offers promise for sharing a responsibility for democratizing science with others."
From the journal Democracy and Education, an article entitled: "Lessons Learned from Citizen Science in the Classroom" by authors Gray, Nicosia and Jordan give a response to a study by Mueller, Tippins and Bryan called "The Future of Citizen Science". GNJ begins by stating in the abstract that the study The Future of Citizen Science: "provides an important theoretical perspective about the future of
democratized science and K12 education." But GRB state: "However, the authors fail to adequately address the existing
barriers and constraints to moving community-based science into the classroom." They end the abstract by arguing: "that the resource constraints of scientists, teachers, and students likely pose problems to moving true democratized science into the classroom."
In 2014, a study was published called "Citizen Science and Lifelong Learning" by R. Edwards in the journal Studies in the Education of Adults. Edwards begins by writing in the abstract that CS projects have expanded over recent years and engaged CSs and professionals in diverse ways. He continues: "Yet there has been little educational exploration of such projects to date." He describes that "there has been limited exploration of the educational backgrounds of adult contributors to citizen science". Edwards explains that CS contributors are referred to as volunteers, citizens or as amateurs. He ends the abstract: "The article will explore the nature and significance of these different characterisations and also suggest possibilities for further research."
In the journal Microbiology and Biology Education a study was published by Shah and Martinez called "Current Approaches in Implementing Citizen Science in the Classroom". They begin by writing in the abstract that CS is a partnership between inexperienced amateurs and trained scientists. The authors continue: "With recent studies showing a weakening in scientific competency of American students, incorporating citizen science initiatives in the curriculum provides a means to address deficiencies". They argue that combining traditional and innovative methods can help provide a practical experience of science. The abstract ends: "Citizen science can be used to emphasize the recognition and use of systematic approaches to solve problems affecting the community."
In November 2017, authors Mitchell, Triska and Liberatore published a study in PLOS ONE titled "Benefits and Challenges of Incorporating Citizen Science into University Education". The authors begin by stating in the abstract that CSs contribute data with the expectation that it will be used. It reports that CS has been used for first year university students as a means to experience research. They continue: "Surveys of more than 1500 students showed that their environmental engagement increased significantly after participating in data collection and data analysis." However, only a third of students agreed that data collected by CSs was reliable. A positive outcome of this was that the students were more careful of their own research. The abstract ends: "If true for citizen scientists in general, enabling participants as well as scientists to analyse data could enhance data quality, and so address a key constraint of broad-scale citizen science programs."

History

"Citizen science" is a fairly new term but an old practice. Prior to the 20th century, science was often the pursuit of gentleman scientists, amateur or self-funded researchers such as Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Darwin. By the mid-20th century, however, science was dominated by researchers employed by universities and government research laboratories. By the 1970s, this transformation was being called into question. Philosopher Paul Feyerabend called for a "democratization of science". Biochemist Erwin Chargaff advocated a return to science by nature-loving amateurs in the tradition of Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Buffon, and Darwin—science dominated by "amateurship instead of money-biased technical bureaucrats".
A study from 2016 indicates that the largest impact of citizen science is in research on biology, conservation and ecology, and is utilized mainly as a methodology of collecting and classifying data.

Amateur astronomy

has long been a field where amateurs have contributed throughout time, all the way up to the present day.
Collectively, amateur astronomers observe a variety of celestial objects and phenomena sometimes with equipment that they build themselves. Common targets of amateur astronomers include the Moon, planets, stars, comets, meteor showers, and a variety of deep-sky objects such as star clusters, galaxies, and nebulae. Observations of comets and stars are also used to measure the local level of artificial skyglow. One branch of amateur astronomy, amateur astrophotography, involves the taking of photos of the night sky. Many amateurs like to specialize in the observation of particular objects, types of objects, or types of events that interest them.
The American Association of Variable Star Observers has gathered data on variable stars for educational and professional analysis since 1911 and promotes participation beyond its membership on its Citizen Sky website.

Butterfly counts

Butterfly counts have a long tradition of involving individuals in the study of butterflies' range and their relative abundance. Two long-running programs are the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme and the North American Butterfly Association's Butterfly Count Program. There are various protocols for monitoring butterflies and different organizations support one or more of transects, counts and/or opportunistic sightings. eButterfly is an example of a program designed to capture any of the three types of counts for observers in North America. Species-specific programs also exist, with monarchs the prominent example. Two examples of this involve the counting of monarch butterflies during the fall migration to overwintering sites in Mexico: Monarch Watch is a continent-wide project, while the Cape May Monarch Monitoring Project is an example of a local project. The Austrian project investigated if and how trained and supervised pupils are able to systematically collect data about the occurrence of diurnal butterflies, and how this data could contribute to a permanent butterfly monitoring system. Despite substantial identification uncertainties for some species or species groups, the data collected by pupils was successfully used to predict the general habitat quality for butterflies.

Ornithology

Citizen science projects have become increasingly focused on providing benefits to scientific research. The North American Bird Phenology Program may have been the earliest collective effort of citizens collecting ornithological information in the U.S. The program, dating back to 1883, was started by Wells Woodbridge Cooke. Cooke established a network of observers around North America to collect bird migration records. The Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count, which began in 1900, is another example of a long-standing tradition of citizen science which has persisted to the present day. Citizen scientists help gather data that will be analyzed by professional researchers, and can be used to produce bird population and biodiversity indicators.
Raptor migration research relies on the data collected by the hawkwatching community. This mostly volunteer group counts migrating accipiters, buteos, falcons, harriers, kites, eagles, osprey, vultures and other raptors at hawk sites throughout North America during the spring and fall seasons. The daily data is uploaded to hawkcount.org where it can be viewed by professional scientists and the public.
Such indices can be useful tools to inform management, resource allocation, policy and planning. For example, European breeding bird survey data provide input for the Farmland Bird Index, adopted by the European Union as a structural indicator of sustainable development. This provides a cost-effective alternative to government monitoring.
Similarly, data collected by citizen scientists as part of BirdLife Australia's has been analysed to produce the first-ever Australian Terrestrial Bird Indices.

Citizen oceanography

The concept of citizen science has been extended to the ocean environment for characterizing ocean dynamics and tracking marine debris. For example, the mobile app Marine Debris Tracker is a joint partnership of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Georgia. Long term sampling efforts such as the continuous plankton recorder has been fitted on ships of opportunity since 1931. Plankton collection by sailors and subsequent genetic analysis was pioneered in 2013 by Indigo V Expeditions as a way to better understand marine microbial structure and function.

Coral reefs

Citizen science in Coral reef studies developed in the 21st century.
Underwater photography has become more popular since the development of moderate priced digital cameras with waterproof housings in the early 2000s, resulting on millions of pictures posted every year on various websites and social media. This mass of documentation has great scientific potential, as millions of tourists possess a much superior coverage power than professional scientists, who cannot spend so much time in the field.
As a consequence, several participative sciences programs have been developed, supported by geotagging and identification web sites. The Monitoring through many eyes project collates thousands of underwater images of the Great Barrier Reef and provides an interface for elicitation of reef health indicators.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also offers opportunities for volunteer participation. By taking measurements in The United States' National Marine Sanctuaries, citizens contribute data to marine biology projects. In 2016, NOAA benefited from 137,000 hours of research.
There also exist protocols for auto-organization and self-teaching aimed at biodiversity-interested snorkelers, in order for them to turn their observations into sound scientific data, available for research. This kind of approach has been successfully used in Réunion island, allowing for tens of new records and even new species.

Rocky reefs

The Tasmania based Reef Life Survey project uses recreational divers train to make fish counts, invertebrate counts along a 50m approximately constant depth transect on tropical and temperate reefs, which may include coral reef. Reef Life Survey is a marine life monitoring programme based in Hobart, Tasmania. It is international in scope, but predominantly Australian, as a large proportion of the volunteers are Australian. Most of the surveys are done by volunteer recreational divers, collecting biodiversity data for marine conservation. The database is available to marine ecology researchers, and is used by several marine protected area managements in Australia, New Zealand, American Samoa and the eastern Pacific.

Agriculture

Farmer participation in experiments has a long tradition in Agricultural science. There are many opportunities for citizen engagement in different parts of food systems. Citizen science is actively used for crop variety selection for climate adaptation, involving thousands of farmers.

Art history

Citizen science has a long tradition in Natural science. But nowadays, citizen science projects can also be found in various fields of science like Art history. For example, the Zooniverse project AnnoTate is a transcription tool developed to enable volunteers to read and transcribe the personal papers of British-born and émigré artists. The papers are drawn from the Tate Archive. Another example of citizen science in art history is ARTigo. ARTigo collects semantic data on artworks from the footprints left by players of games featuring artwork images. From these footprints, ARTigo automatically builds a semantic search engine for artworks.

Modern technology

Newer technologies have increased the options for citizen science. Citizen scientists can build and operate their own instruments to gather data for their own experiments or as part of a larger project. Examples include amateur radio, amateur astronomy, Six Sigma Projects, and Maker activities. Scientist Joshua Pearce has advocated for the creation of open-source hardware based scientific equipment that both citizen scientists and professional scientists, which can be replicated by digital manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. Multiple studies have shown this approach radically reduces scientific equipment costs. Examples of this approach include water testing, nitrate and other environmental testing, basic biology and optics. Groups such as Public Lab, which is a community where citizen scientists can learn how to investigate environmental concerns using inexpensive DIY techniques, embody this approach.
Video technology is much used in scientific research. The Citizen Science Center in the Nature Research Center wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has exhibits on how to get involved in scientific research and become a citizen scientist. For example, visitors can observe birdfeeders at the Prairie Ridge Ecostation satellite facility via live video feed and record which species they see.
Since 2005, the Genographic Project has used the latest genetic technology to expand our knowledge of the human story, and its pioneering use of DNA testing to engage and involve the public in the research effort has helped to create a new breed of "citizen scientist". Geno 2.0 expands the scope for citizen science, harnessing the power of the crowd to discover new details of human population history. This includes supporting, organization and dissemination of personal DNA testing. Like Amateur astronomy, citizen scientists encouraged by volunteer organizations like the International Society of Genetic Genealogy have provided valuable information and research to the professional scientific community.
With unmanned aerial vehicles, further citizen science is enabled. One example is the ESA's AstroDrone smartphone app for gathering robotic data with the Parrot AR.Drone.
Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, seeks to combine citizen science with citizen space exploration. CIS is training citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators on suborbital reusable spacecraft that are now in development. CIS will also be developing, and encouraging others to develop, citizen-science payloads to fly on suborbital vehicles. CIS has already acquired a contract for 10 flights on the Lynx suborbital vehicle, being developed by XCOR Aerospace, and plans to acquire additional flights on XCOR Lynx and other suborbital vehicles in the future.
CIS believes that "The development of low-cost reusable suborbital spacecraft will be the next great enabler, allowing citizens to participate in space exploration and space science."

Internet

The Internet has been a boon to citizen science, particularly through gamification. One of the first Internet-based citizen science experiments was NASA's Clickworkers, which enabled the general public to assist in the classification of images, greatly reducing the time to analyze large data sets. Another was the Citizen Science Toolbox, launched in 2003, of the Australian Coastal Collaborative Research Centre. Mozak is a game in which players create 3D reconstructions from images of actual human and mouse neurons, helping to advance understanding of the brain. One of the largest citizen science games is Eyewire, a brain-mapping puzzle game developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that now has over 200,000 players. Another example is Quantum Moves, a game developed by the Center for Driven Community Research at Aarhus University, which uses online community efforts to solve quantum physics problems. The solutions found by players can then be used in the lab to feed computational algorithms used in building a scalable quantum computer.
More generally, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is frequently used in the creation, collection, and processing of data by paid citizens. There is controversy as to whether or not the data collected through such services is reliable, as it is subject to participants' desire for compensation. However, use of Mechanical Turk tends to quickly produce more diverse participant backgrounds, as well as comparably accurate data when compared to traditional collection methods.
The internet has also enabled citizen scientists to gather data to be analyzed by professional researchers. Citizen science networks are often involved in the observation of cyclic events of nature, such as effects of global warming on plant and animal life in different geographic areas, and in monitoring programs for natural-resource management. On BugGuide.Net, an online community of naturalists who share observations of arthropod, amateurs and professional researchers contribute to the analysis. By October 2014, BugGuide has over 808,718 images submitted by more than 27,846 contributors.
showing a hierarchical bubble structure
Not counting iNaturalist and eBird, the Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them. On 29 June 2015, the Zooniverse released a new software version with a project-building tool allowing any registered user to create a project. Project owners may optionally complete an approval process to have their projects listed on the Zooniverse site and promoted to the Zooniverse community. A NASA/JPL picture to the right gives an example from one of Zooniverse's projects The Milky Way Project.
The website CosmoQuest has as its goal "To create a community of people bent on together advancing our understanding of the universe; a community of people who are participating in doing science, who can explain why what they do matters, and what questions they are helping to answer.
CrowdCrafting enables its participants to create and run projects where volunteers help with image classification, transcription, geocoding and more. The platform is powered by PyBossa software, a free and open-source framework for crowdsourcing.
Project Soothe is a citizen science research project based at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of this research is to create a bank of soothing images, submitted by members of the public, which can be used to help others through psychotherapy and research in the future. Since 2015, Project Soothe has received over 600 soothing photographs from people in 23 countries. Anyone aged 12 years or over are eligible to participate in this research in two ways: By submitting soothing photos that they have taken with a description of why the images make them feel soothed By rating the photos that have been submitted by people worldwide for their soothability.

Smartphone

The bandwidth and ubiquity afforded by smartphones has vastly expanded the opportunities for citizen science. Examples include iNaturalist, the San Francisco project, the WildLab, Project Noah, and Aurorasurus. Due to their ubiquity, for example, Twitter, Facebook, and smartphones have been useful for citizen scientists, having enabled them to discover and propagate a new type of aurora dubbed "STEVE" in 2016.
There are also apps for monitoring birds, marine wildlife and other organisms, and the "Loss of the Night".
An Android app Sapelli is a mobile data-collection and -sharing platform designed with a particular focus on non-literate and illiterate users. The SPOTTERON app creates synergy effects for projects by sharing a common feature set.
"The Crowd and the Cloud" is a four-part series broadcast during April 2017, which examines citizen science. It shows how smartphones, computers and mobile technology enable regular citizens to become part of a 21st-century way of doing science. The programs also demonstrate how CSs help professional scientists to advance knowledge, which helps speed up new discoveries and innovations. The Crowd & The Cloud is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation.

Seismology

Since 1975, in order to improve earthquake detection and collect useful information, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre monitors the visits of earthquake eyewitnesses to its website and relies on Facebook and Twitter. More recently, they developed the LastQuake mobile application which notifies users about earthquakes occurring around the world, alerts people when earthquakes hit near them, gathers earthquake eyewitnesses' testimonies to estimate the felt ground shaking and possible damages.

Hydrology

Citizen science has been used to provide valuable data in hydrology, notably flood risk, water quality and water resource management. A growth in internet use and smartphone ownership has allowed users to collect and share real-time flood-risk information using, for example, social media and web-based forms. Although traditional data collection methods are well-established, citizen science is being used to fill the data gaps on a local level, and is therefore meaningful to individual communities. It has been demonstrated that citizen science is particularly advantageous during a flash flood because the public are more likely to witness these rarer hydrological events than scientists.

Plastics and pollution

Citizen science includes projects that help monitor plastics and their associated pollution. These include The Ocean Cleanup, #OneLess, The Big Microplastic Survey, EXXpedition and Alliance to End Plastic Waste. Ellipsis seeks to map the distribution of litter using aerial data mapping by unmanned aerial vehicles and machine learning software. A Zooniverse project called The Plastic Tide helped train an algorithm used by Ellipsis.
Projects that use apps include:
Examples of relevant articles :
Examples of relevant scientific studies or books include :
Citizen sensing can be a form of Citizen science: "The work of citizen sensing, as a form of citizen science, then further transforms Stengers’s notion of the work of science by moving the experimental facts and collectives where scientific work is undertaken out of the laboratory of experts and into the world of citizens." Similar sensing activities include Crowdsensing and Participatory monitoring. While the idea of using mobile technology to aid this sensing is not new, creating devices and systems that can be used to aid regulation has not been straightforward. Some examples of projects that include citizen sensing are:
Resources for computer science and scientific crowdsourcing projects concerning coronavirus disease 2019 can be found on the internet or as apps. Some such projects are listed below:
For coronavirus studies and information that can help enable CS, many online resources are available through open access and open science websites, including portals run by the Cambridge University Press, the Europe branch of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, The Lancet, John Wiley and Sons, and Springer Nature.

Around the world

Africa

in Tanzania
The first Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research was held in Portland, Oregon in August 2012. Citizen science is now often a theme at large conferences, such as the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
In 2010, 2012 and 2014 there were three Citizen Cyberscience summits, organised by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre in Geneva and University College London. The 2014 summit was hosted in London and attracted over 300 participants.
In November 2015, the ETH Zürich and University of Zürich hosted an international meeting on the "Challenges and Opportunities in Citizen Science".
The first citizen science conference hosted by the Citizen Science Association was in San Jose, California, in February 2015 in partnership with the AAAS conference. The Citizen Science Association conference, CitSci 2017, was held in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States, between 17 and 20 May 2017. The conference had more than 600 attendees. The next CitSci is in March 2019 in Raleigh, USA.
The platform "Österreich forscht" hosts the annual Austrian citizen science conference since 2015.

National and regional portals

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