The grand challenges facing environmental citizen science
Published Sep 20, 2022 · S. Fritz, L. See, F. Grey
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Abstract
Citizen science is becoming increasingly popular as a way of engaging citizens in environmental monitoring. There has been a wide discussion around what citizen science is and is not. For example, should it include only active or deliberate contributions by participants, or can it also include passive or involuntary citizen participation, e.g., where crowdsourced data on social media are analyzed for a specific scientific purpose? Should it only be voluntary, or can it also include payments? While the debate is important (Haklay et al., 2021), here, we use the term citizen science in the broadest sense possible, to mean the engagement and participation of non-professional scientists in the production of scientific knowledge. Although citizen science has traditionally been used in an environmental monitoring context, an important and very valuable characteristic is that it has the potential to reach beyond individual scientific disciplines and to attract wider public participation (Bonney et al., 2009). This is particularly true in the digital age where technology has been a key enabler of citizen participation in a much wider range of research, including technologically demanding fields such as particle physics or synthetic biology, as well as whole disciplines such as medicine, the social sciences and the humanities (Pykett et al., 2020; Tauginienė et al., 2020; Haklay et al., 2021). Hence, for this special collection of environmental citizen science that was launched in March 2022, we want to include any research using citizen science methodologies that is relevant to environmental science, in a broad and inclusive manner. The use of citizen science for environmental research is evolving rapidly, partly due to the increasingly visible impacts of climate change, which is galvanizing public participation globally. In this paper we discuss six grand challenges that face this growing area of research, namely: 1) Perennial issues that the scientific establishment raises about data quality in citizen science, as applied to environmental research; 2) the use of citizen science by governments, local authorities andNational Statistical Offices (NSOs) as a source of non-traditional data for monitoring and decision making; 3) new forms of engagement, motivation and retention of citizens; 4) open data and the sharing of citizen science data; 5) the integration of data from new digital technologies and how citizen science can help bridge the digital divide and inequalities in participation; and 6) how environmental citizen science relates to research on the global environmental challenges that humanity is currently facing such as the climate emergency, the continued destruction of the rainforests, dramatic losses in biodiversity, and increasing inequality, to name just a few. On this last point, in a recent youth survey by OPEN ACCESS