全球智库信息集成服务系统

Community citizen science and traditional scientific institutions reflect different cultures

• Concerns about the rigor of community citizen science arise mainly from traditional scientific institutions.
• Distinctions between professional scientists and community citizen scientists can seem unclear — both groups might use the same methods, but professionals have more-extensive formal credentials and are given greater benefit of the doubt.
• Community citizen science might operate under a different research paradigm from that of traditional science.

Community citizen science can creatively leverage resources to address project implementation challenges

• Community citizen science can face many challenges to project implementation, including scaling and replicating activities, balancing the roles of professional and citizen scientists, navigating competition and duplication within the field, clearly communicating project mission and objectives, and obtaining needed project resources.
• Disaster-related community citizen science can leverage creative solutions to address challenges.

Conveying credibility and promoting community citizen science research will be important for meeting policy-related objectives

• Policy-relevant outcomes can motivate community citizen science research more than they do other research models.
• There are many avenues to convey credibility of community citizen science and promote its uses.

Citizen science is the use of scientific methods by the general public to ask and answer questions and solve problems. In community citizen science, groups of volunteers exert a high degree of control over research, working with professional scientists during the research process and performing research on their own. This important, yet understudied, model often focuses on addressing community concerns. A better characterization of community citizen science could yield insights into important barriers and opportunities for translating its research into action.

In this report, the authors characterize the nature of community citizen science and its potential uses, identify implementation needs and challenges, conceptualize pathways through which community citizen science could achieve policy and community impacts, and elucidate challenges that might impede people from achieving their goals. Part of their research included interviewing representatives of three community citizen science projects carried out for disaster response and recovery: SkyTruth pollution tracking applications; Planetary Response Network activations for disaster response; and the Blue Water Task Force and Hurricane Maria–related activities of the Rincón, Puerto Rico, chapter of the Surfrider Foundation.

The authors used findings from the disaster response and recovery case studies to identify specific considerations for community citizen science implementation and impacts. Interviews with general citizen science experts provided a greater understanding of how the cultures and institutions that make up the larger field of citizen science could shape and react to the development of community citizen science.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Methods

• Chapter Three

  Case Study Descriptions

• Chapter Four

  Thematic Analyses

• Chapter Five

  Conclusions