Citizen Science Practices

What does “good” citizen science look like? How can programs achieve more and better public participation in biodiversity monitoring and management? These are important open questions (Berti Suman et al., 2023; Kasperowski & Kullenberg, 2019; Peltola & Ratamäki, 2023; Sterner & Elliott, 2023) for anyone wanting to promote and/or facilitate citizen science programs. 

On this website, the invitation is to explore some problematic assumptions about biodiversity citizen science, and learn what is happening with volunteers and participation platforms instead. My name is Debbie Gonzalez Canada, and while doing my PhD I investigated:

1) What volunteers actually do when monitoring biodiversity in contributory programs, when the assumption is that they “only collect data.”

2) How volunteers care about and for the data they create, when the assumption sometimes is that they collect, submit, and forget about data.

3) How digital technologies shape participation in knowledge production in citizen science, when the assumption is that the digital “is just making participation easy.”

Spoiler alert: I found that volunteers carried varied knowledge and data care practices, and in doing so, they co-created participation in contributory programs. They were not just engaging in pre-defined ways; volunteers imprinted their own logics onto citizen science. Alongside the dominant logic of digitalization “making participation easy” in biodiversity monitoring, volunteers had alternative logics for their practices, which were more in line with making participation meaningful. This has important implications for practitioners that seek to improve their programs, from data quality and quantity, to imagining better metrics for participation altogether.