Citizen science and crowdsourcing

Abstract

Citizen Science has different definitions (Vohland et al., 2021) but essentially refers to the involvement of avocational volunteers, or citizen researchers, in scientific research. Going beyond dissemination and outreach, citizen science aims at a close collaboration and participatory knowledge production between scientists and citizen researchers. Volunteer contributions can help to bypass professional bottlenecks in data collection (hence ‘crowdsourcing’, short for ‘outsourcing to the crowd’). Citizen science projects can also benefit from the ideas, knowledge and skills of citizen researchers in project design, data analysis and interpretation, and dissemination and outreach, although not many projects reach that level of involvement yet.