The future of citizen science: emerging technologies and shifting paradigms

By Greg Newman, Andrea Wiggins, Alycia Crall, Eric A. Graham, S. Newman, Kevin Crowston. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2012

723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Citizen science creates a nexus between science and education that, when coupled with emerging technologies, expands the frontiers of ecological research and public engagement. Using representative technologies and other examples, we examine the future of citizen science in terms of its research processes, program and participant cultures, and scientific communities. Future citizen-science projects will likely be influenced by sociocultural issues related to new technologies and will continue to face practical programmatic challenges. We foresee networked, open science and the use of online computer/video gaming as important tools to engage non-traditional audiences, and offer recommendations to help prepare project managers for impending challenges. A more formalized citizen-science enterprise, complete with networked organizations, associations, journals, and cyberinfrastructure, will advance scientific research, including ecology, and further public education.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e77f49607c11a9a36e4d8f7e559da2b6738f8731

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. Chris D. Preston
2. Michael J. O. Pocock
3. Helen E. Roy
4. David Roy
5. Andrea Wiggins
6. A. Swanson
7. R. Fox
8. Christopher M Thomas

In Ecology

1. Michael J. O. Pocock
2. Helen E. Roy
3. Margaret Kosmala
4. David Roy
5. Chris D. Preston
6. A. Swanson

In Genetics

1. Andrea Wiggins
2. Helen E. Roy
3. Michael J. O. Pocock
4. David Roy
5. Chris D. Preston
6. A. Swanson

Citations in the corpus

• The Biological Records Centre: a pioneer of citizen science (2015, background): “However, communications technology has facilitated the ability to make records, especially incidental records, through smartphone apps (Newman et al., 2012).”
• Assessing data quality in citizen science (preprint) (2016, background): “Rising interest in this approach has been fueled in part by rapid technological developments (Newman et al. 2012), by policy and management needs for largescale and long- term monitoring datasets (Conrad and Hilchey 2011), and by increased emphasis on science outreach and education (Silvertown 2009)”