Making a Difference with Citizen Science
When Stella Bowles was 11 and a Grade 6 student at LaHave, in Nova Scotia, Canada, she was told that she could not swim in the river in front of her house, as the houses in the neighbourhood discharged untreated sewage through straight pipes into it. With essential help from a neighbouring scientist, Dr Maxwell, she learned how to take and analyse water samples correctly. As a result of her findings, she put up a sign stating:
‘THIS RIVER IS CONTAMINATED BY FECAL BACTERIA’
which started to have a local impact. Then she started posting online her findings of contamination levels in areas where local people swam or went boating.
The net result was that her ‘Do It Yourself’ campaign was picked up by local then national press, and she prompted changes to the legislation from three levels of government, generated a total investment in clean up of $15.7million, met the Prime Minister of Canada, and won a series of awards for youth environmental activism.
Those facts may not fit every set of facts or scientific issue, and not everyone wants, or is able to be, a campaigner like Stella Bowles, but her achievements are a reminder that citizens and science are not necessarily polar opposites, but can work together for the common good.
Between 2007 and 2019, the Open Air Laboratories (‘OPAL’) project led by Imperial College in London was a UK-wide citizen science initiative enabling people to engage in hands on nature conservation. Projects while contributing to important scientific research. It involved universities, charities, museums and environmental organisations, with Defra and the Environment Agency as associate partners. The OPAL management team helped to establish the European Citizen Science Association, now led from the Natural History Museum Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. This in turn has developed the Ten Principles of Citizen Science which are still applied around the world.
Ten Principles of Citizen Science
Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding. Citizens may act as contributors, collaborators or as project leaders and have a meaningful role in the project.
Citizen science projects have a genuine science outcome. For example, answering a research question or informing conservation action, management decisions or environmental policy.
Both the professional scientists and the citizen scientists benefit from taking part. Benefits may include the publication of research outputs, learning opportunities, personal enjoyment, social benefits, satisfaction through contributing to scientific evidence, for example, to address local, national and international issues, and through that, the potential to influence policy.
Citizen scientists may, if they wish, participate in multiple stages of the scientific process. This may include developing the research question, designing the method, gathering and analysing data, and communicating the results.
Citizen scientists receive feedback from the project. For example, how their data are being used and what the research, policy or societal outcomes are.
Citizen science is considered a research approach like any other, with limitations and biases that should be considered and controlled for. However unlike traditional research approaches, citizen science provides opportunity for greater public engagement and democratisation of science.
Citizen science project data and metadata are made publicly available and where possible, results are published in an open-access format. Data sharing may occur during or after the project, unless there are security or privacy concerns that prevent this.
Citizen scientists are acknowledged in project results and publications.
Citizen science programmes are evaluated for their scientific output, data quality, participant experience and wider societal or policy impact.
The leaders of citizen science projects take into consideration legal and ethical issues surrounding copyright, intellectual property, data-sharing agreements, confidentiality, attribution and the environmental impact of any activities.
By the conclusion of the OPAL programme, more than 1 million people had participated, more than 3,500 schools had participated, many from areas of high deprivation, over 2,800 organisations had worked with OPAL, about 270,000 information packs had been distributed to the public, over 54,000 surveys had been submitted, more than 23,000 sites surveyed, and 21 scientific papers published.
OPAL was one approach to demonstrating the power and potential of citizen science, but it was by no means the only one.
On 22 March 2022 in Geoscience Data Journal , Professor Ed Hawkins and others published an article ‘Millions of historical monthly rainfall observations taken in the UK and Ireland rescued by citizen scientists’ In what must qualify as one of the best and most constructive uses of the COVID lockdowns, the scientists described them as “a unique opportunity to ask for help in transcribing the observations from volunteer members of the public who had additional spare time and the desire to usefully contribute to science.”
What they achieved together was the scan into the National Meteorological Archive of 66,000 paper sheets containing 5.28 million hand-written monthly rainfall observations taken across the UK and Ireland between 1677 and 1960. More than 16,000 volunteer citizen scientists worked on this during early 2020 using the RainfallRescue.org website and the Zooniverse platform. This increased the total number of monthly rainfall observations available for the time period by a factor of six, and has enabled “much improved reconstructions of past variations in rainfall across the British and Irish Isles, including for periods of significant flooding and drought.”
On today’s River Wye, which runs down the Marches and borderland between Wales and England, the Citizen Science Friends of the River Wye organise hundreds of volunteers, and ensure that they are given basic training in water quality sampling in order to provide both local responses to pollution incidents and a bank of data on the water quality across the whole river catchment which is made available to the regulators with statutory responsibilities , Natural Resources Wales for Wales and the Environment Agency in England.
The Friends of the River Wye aims to have regular meetings with the regulators, and to develop better and more effective ways to ensure that the data collected by its small army of enthusiastic volunteers is used by both regulators to extend their own reach and to help deliver better environmental outcomes for a badly stressed river environment.
Most citizen scientists will cheerfully acknowledge that to have real value, their work needs to be guided by the best available training and guidance from full time and professional scientists. That said, scientists could usefully keep an open mind on the potential value of well guided citizen science in support of their own research and programmes. At times like these, public support for science, and the willingness of individuals to take active steps to become involved in it, should be doubly welcome. The UK’s small army of citizen scientists take water samples, record garden birds, count river fly life, transcribe rainfall records, measure air quality, and monitor microplastics and the biodiversity on beaches.