Caren B. Cooper; Jennifer Shirk; Benjamin Zuckerberg

“ But is citizen science effective at science?
Research focused on the scientific value of citizen science has yet to directly quantify the impact of citizen science to any specific area of scientific research, but has instead focused on concerns regarding data quality e.g., [16] , [17] . Data from citizen-science efforts can indeed have biases, the largest source of which may originate from the extent to which people self-select to participate, which affect the effort they expend, their level of skill, and the spatiotemporal distribution of the data [18] . ”

“ Given the invisible prevalence of citizen science in advancing this one area of global change research, we suspect it also common in many other areas of inquiry such as studies of land-use change, invasive species, and environmental pollutants, to name a few. We urge future use of consistent terminology and acknowledgement to facilitate tracking the impact of citizen science across numerous disciplines. ”

“ We expect that research related to climate change may be particularly well suited to draw on citizen science because: (i) the influence of climate change spans broad spatial scales, possibly affecting species throughout their entire ranges, (ii) ecological responses are highly variable across space, that is, not all populations are exposed to similar trends in climate, and (iii) climate-induced impacts occur over long periods of time, from decades to centuries, generally longer than the duration of any scientists' careers or a typical funding cycle. ”