Citizen Science - Science topic

"The two likely candidates for the November US Presidential elections — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — have opposing views on many issues. Nature talks to researchers and policy analysts about three key areas for science:

Jens Kleb Sherrie-Lee Evans I would like to thank you both for your answers. In regards to local companies, the last year I ve been thinking to engage local shop owners and companies by incorporating traditional products and even packaging in the treasure hunt. Collecting photos of the 2-3 centuries old stone bridges by the participants would be a great idea. What concerns me is the volume of data, uploading them on a page via a social utility might effectively work. This may work with stories as well, I will be having teams of 4-5 in each of the 4 regions (villages) to generate their own narratives through local legends, history and even mythoplastic stories. However collecting stories together with photos through a page sounds a great idea to start with. I should be able to come up with a research question, thank you!

Certainly, not all information obtained is accurate, we need accurate data and checks to prove the accuracy of the data

Geologists, soil scientists and others have learned to detect indicators of instability. I mentioned some of these in our paper on Watershed Restoration after Calamity. Observant landowners and citizens can also identify some of these indicators, and bring attention to them. Irrigation as well as channel instability from both aggradation or degradation can be contributors as well as the more recognized land clearing, road construction with cut and fill slopes and associated hydrologic and slope modifications. Although various signs of instability may be present, extreme rainfall event can sometimes trigger conditions and initiate failure. Although LiDAR coverage can be very helpful in identifying areas of instability, the regular interpretation of aerial photo pairs in stereo can also be helpful, and what was often used in the past to help identify areas of instability, for further field analysis. As indicated, citizen involvement can be helpful for suggesting further analysis, or initiate safety measures or activity adjustments.

hi,

refer this link:

Sincerely appreciated all answers and helps!

Dear Ruben, thank you. I`ll try to use your reply when summarizing the discussion.

Regards, Anatoly

Is there such an app?

You may want to look at Open Data Kit: https://getodk.org/

Or KoboToolbox: https://www.kobotoolbox.org/

Both are form/survey orientated, but with the right setup you could have something that effectively worked as a dedicated app would - for a relatively simple task as described.

The term Citizen Science is an arrogantly dismissive label assigned to non academics by academics. There are many non academic people doing very good science as an adjunct to their careers. The work should be treated as any other science, reviewed and utilized based on it's process and merits rather than the author's affiliation.

It affected badly.

Auke-Florian Hiemstra

Thank yu for this platform

I think you can use landsat 8 images if the invasive species has spread in a larger area. Something like NDVI would help to differentiate.

If you can get areal images by yourself, try a software like eCognition by Timble. ArcMap would also do a simple classification.

Thank you very much for your answer to my question.

Really helpful!

J.

When the sample size is large, naturally the error will get minimized. Further, if you collect data on relevant foraging variables, they should be subjected to tools such as PCA/ DFA, which will result in niche segregation.

While mixed methods approaches to research have been accepted practice within the social sciences for several decades (Tashakkori and Teddlie 2003), the rising demand for cross-disciplinary analyses of socio-environmental processes has necessitated a renewed examination of this approach within environmental studies. Urban environmental stewardship is one area where it is clear that neither a quantitative nor qualitative approach can provide a full understanding. Rather, the typologies and relationships identified by quantitative data are essential to structuring qualitative data collection strategies in such a way as to lead to specific knowledge of how stewardship groups affect governance systems by carrying information and resources across sectors and scales. In short, stewardship is an issue within environmental studies that demands a mixed methods approach in order to understand the social-ecological implications. This chapter demonstrates one way in which such research might be structured.

One of the solutions, citizen participation... The theory and practice of urban governance in recent years has undergone both a collaborative and participatory turn. The strong connection between collaboration and participation has meant that citizen participation in urban governance has been conceived in a very particular way: as varying levels of partnership between state actors and citizens. This over-focus on collaboration has led to: 1) a dearth of proposals in theory and practice for citizens to engage oppositionally with institutions; 2) the miscasting of agonistic opportunities for participation as forms of collaboration; 3) an inability to recognise the irruption of agonistic practices into participatory procedures. This article attempts to expand the conception of participatory urban governance by adapting Rosanvallon’s (2008) three democratic counter-powers—prevention, oversight and judgement—to consider options for institutionalising agonistic participatory practices. It argues that these counter-governance processes would more fully realise the inclusion agenda that underpins the participatory governance project... Dean, R. J. (2018). Counter-governance: Citizen participation beyond collaboration. Politics and Governance, 6(1), 180-188.

In our recent paper, we applied kernel smoothing, a method from spatial point pattern analysis (SPPA), to quantify historical and recent grasshopper range shifts in Germany. The main advantage of SPPA is that it reduces potential biases attributable to differences in sampling effort across space and time and thus is a well-suited tool to analyze opportunistic distribution data. For more details, please see our attached paper: Poniatowski, D., Beckmann, C., Löffler, F., Münsch, T., Helbing, F., Samways, M.J. & T. Fartmann (2020): Relative impacts of land-use and climate change on grasshopper range shifts have changed over time. Global Ecology and Biogeography. doi: 10.1111/geb.13188

Why are the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus pandemic SARS-CoV-2 not being implemented or implemented to a very limited extent in the construction sector under the anti-crisis shields launched in individual countries, which aim to quickly restore the economy after the Coronavirus pandemic?

Many economic data already support the thesis that the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus pandemic on the global economy is likely to be very large. Many enterprises in the tourist, hotel, catering, cosmetics services, etc. are currently losing most, almost all, or all customers because people are afraid of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection (causing Covid-19) and this is also due to various restrictions moving away from home and introducing an order or recommendation to stay at home as part of preventive quarantine in many countries. As a result, many companies are already recording large declines in sales and profits, limiting employment and / or stopping their business. In connection with these negative aspects of the deepening recession, many current economic data already confirm the thesis that probably now (April 2020) in many countries an economic crisis is beginning, which may after a few months turn into a debt crisis of the state finance system. If this situation occurs in many countries, then in 2020 the global economy will most likely slow down its growth by several percent. compared to the previous year. Therefore, it is necessary to permanently improve and increase the scale of anti-crisis socio-economic policy planned, developed and implemented both at the level of individual countries as well as within coordinated international activities. In some countries, pro-development, interventionist, anti-crisis programs have already been launched to save business entities from mass bankruptcy by introducing additional temporary tax breaks or exemptions, subsidies to employees' remuneration under fiscal policy. On the other hand, as part of monetary policy, central banks reduce interest rates, launch loans for commercial banks on preferential terms, buy lost loans from commercial banks and / or implement sovereign bond buy-back programs to maintain liquidity in the commercial and public financial system of the state. However, interventionist economic policy programs involving the launch of large investment projects in the construction sector financed from the public finance system funds are used to a limited extent. Does the period of economic downturn caused by the development of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus pandemic and the introduced anti-pandemic safety instruments (temporary suspension of production in many enterprises and the closure of many service plants) last too short to launch large investment projects in the construction sector, or is it lacking type of money goals in the state finance sector? After all, such development-oriented instruments would create many jobs and could be an important factor in anti-crisis economic policy. Regardless of what exactly large investment projects would relate to, whether they would be programs for the construction of housing estates or the construction of large communication infrastructure facilities for the development of car communication arteries, highways, new power plants as part of the development of renewable energy sources, renovation of railway stations, expansion of airports, facilities rainwater retention system, etc., during the implementation of each of these investments many new jobs would be created and new infrastructural durable economic goods would be created, thanks to which in the following years economic processes would be carried out more efficiently and efficiently.

In connection with the above, I am asking you the following question: Why are the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus pandemic SARS-CoV-2 not being implemented or implemented to a very limited extent in the construction sector under the anti-crisis shields launched in individual countries, which aim to quickly restore the economy after the Coronavirus pandemic?

Please reply,

What is your opinion on this topic?

I am asking for an answer and invite you to a discussion,

Thank you very much and best regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

Well, it depends on your interests. If you are thinking peer reviewed there are some journals that don't have page charges. And there certainly are ways to publish solid citizen science data in such outlets. But there are also other opportunities. Personally I started writing essays a few years back and some of them have data tucked in. Better than not having to pay, some papers will pay you. Here's an example with a little preliminary data that I would not otherwise have followed up on: https://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/duckweed-migration

I know this question is old but in case anyone in 2020 is looking for this dataset just like myself, here is a link i found: https://figshare.com/articles/Android_malware_dataset_for_machine_learning_1/5854590/1

Tanja Krasnikov , If it is not too late here is another example that looks at the use of Citizen scientists in the rescuing of a sample collection.

Pring, J., Wyborn, L. and Evans, N., 2019. Reviving an Old and Valuable Collection of Microscope Slides Through the Use of Citizen Science. Data Science Journal, 18(1), p.57. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-057

Hi.,

The Citizen science projects are activities sponsored by a wide variety of organizations so non-scientists can meaningfully contribute to scientific research. Activities vary widely from transcribing old ship logbooks to digitize the data as part of the Old Weather project to observing and counting birds at home... Citizen science programs are evaluated in a number of forums, including in ... scale of citizen science projects can be attributed to an increase in enabling ... or schemata, offer varied framings of particular issues in line with a critical realist

Hi David,

My colleagues and I launched many citizen science projects in Taiwan in recent years, and we are good at using social media (most on facebook) to share our results and interact with thousands of participants. If you were interested in, questions and suggestions are very welcome.

Here is a pamphlet regarding our projects on birds.

Thank you so much!

Cheers,

Dali

dear all,

find here an example of a Citizen Science approach used to study landslides (among other hazards) in a remote environment in Africa.

There are many other options than eBird for a wider species range. Here in Europe Observation.org (www.observation.org) is the most popular after 15 years, with 100 millions observations and 100.000.000 users. It is international, and it is growing fastly. Its mobile apps are amazing for professional and amateur naturalists, with much more data quality than eBird.

Regards

Julio Rabadán González

Citizen science data can be highly unreliable if not cleaned up via removal of biased data, with apriori data integrity checks. Though usually relatively easier and cheap to acquire for a purpose, it should be used with extra-caution, taking context in consideration.

Hi Kenneth,

1) I agree that it probably wouldn't work as it is currently set up. The UK have a carbon tax. What usually happens with taxes (in the UK) such as Sugar, road tax, tax on cigarettes, etc is that they are put into one pot and distributed how the government see fit. As I currently understand it the money generated from the sugar tax isn't directly utilised for education on excessive sugar intake or to treat diabetes. I'm thinking outside the box here but what if they took the tax and used it to acquire land and plant trees rather than take the carbon tax put it in one pot and use it to fix roads, etc.

2) If they used it to protect green areas and plant trees it would potentially go some way to reducing C02 although I understand it would be negligible but its better than nothing. It would be either prove you can reduce C02 or pay the tax that directly goes towards planting trees.

I understand that the current methods dont work. In the conclusion on the paper below: "The impact of a carbon tax on manufacturing: Evidence from microdata" it states:

"While curbing industrial emissions must be an integral part of any such policy, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence on the impacts of large-scale regulations of industrial GHG emissions".

Paper: https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0047272714001078/1-s2.0-S0047272714001078-main.pdf?_tid=97ec8cca-1fca-4785-b6b8-b2a972c5358b&acdnat=1543306908_1b59d2ab232ca86a919d52c1c6fb1631

I think in conclusion we should never write off any ideas, but we should never go into anything without carrying out comprehensive research into the economical / environmental impact and feasibility. It is very complex and as I mentioned its as complex and diverse business as the industry it affects.

Just to clarify I'm just an engineer in automotive industry, I'm not claiming to be any type of expert on this subject. I would just like to see people thinking more outside of the box and generating discussion. I think we can all do something. Personally I have been growing trees over the past three years, its my very small way of teaching my son how to do something positive as well as teaching him about nature.

Thanks Elizabete - sorry for my crazy late reply. Hope all is well - Greg

Have a look at these references.

- Rosenthal, Robert. "The volunteer subject." Human relations 18, no. 4 (1965): 389-406.

- Clary, E. Gil, Mark Snyder, and Arthur A. Stukas. "Volunteers' motivations: Findings from a national survey." Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly 25, no. 4 (1996): 485-505.

- Farrell, Jocelyn M., Margaret E. Johnston, and G. David Twynam. "Volunteer motivation, satisfaction, and management at an elite sporting competition." Journal of sport Management 12, no. 4 (1998): 288-300.

- Peterson, Dane K. "Benefits of participation in corporate volunteer programs: employees' perceptions." Personnel review 33, no. 6 (2004): 615-627.

Fisher's f-test (test if variances are different)

t-test (test if means are different)

Thank you very much everyone!

Yes , here in Panama we have a citizen scientists cooperation, see fcprimatespanama.org

Dear Lukas

I send you some references that may be useful to start:

Richards, J.A. 1999. Remote Sensing Digital Image Analysis, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, p. 240.

Jensen, J.R. (1986): Introductory Digital Image Processing. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 379 p.

Calculating Sample Size for Stratified Random Sample. U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2000. Forest Service Handbook, FSH 2409.12 – Timber Cruising Handbook, Washington, DC, 237 p.

Selkowitz, D. J., & Stehman, S. V. (2011). Thematic accuracy of the National

Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2001 land cover for Alaska. Remote Sensing of Environment, 115(6), 1401–1407. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2011.01.020

Di Gregorio, A. 2005. Land cover classification system: Classification concepts and user manual: LCCS. Vol. 8, Food & Agriculture Org.

Daniel Gómez, Javier Montero. 2011. Determining the accuracy in image supervised classification problems.

Gong, P.,Wang, J., Yu, L., Zhao, Y., Zhao, Y., Liang, L., Niu, Z., Huang, X., Fu, H., Liu, S., et al. (2013). Finer resolution observation and monitoring of global land cover: First mapping results with landsat tm and etm + data. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 34, 2607–2654.

REX PEACOCK. 2014. ACCURACY ASSESSMENT OF SUPERVISED AND UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION USING LANDSAT IMAGERY OF LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS.Thesis.

Sarah Lynn Lewis-Gonzales. 2015. Accuracy of Supervised Classification of Cropland in sub–Saharan Africa. Thesis.

Zhao, Y.; Feng, D., Yua, L., Wang, X., Chen, Y., Hernández, H.J., Galleguillos, M., Estades, C., Biging, G., Radke, J. & Gong, P. 2016. Detailed dynamic land cover mapping of Chile: accuracy improvement by integrating multi-seasonal land cover data. Remote Sensing of Environment 183, 170–185.

Ramakalavathi Marapareddy, James V. Aanstoos and Nicolas H. Younan.2017.Accuracy Analysis Comparison of Supervised Classification Methods for Anomaly Detection on Levees Using SAR Imagery. Electronics 6, 83; doi:10.3390/electronics6040083.

Best regards

LM

Use AMs could be another option as phosphorous accumulator disallowing major chunk of phosphorous to move into water bodies..

Maria,

I can get what you are saying. The following literature may be of your interest.

L

InsightMaker would work. It is very easy to use.

 Dear Prashant, I am working now with cyanobacteria biofilms from Lake Baikal. I can suggest to keep psychrophiles in liquid mineral media with ammonium ions instead nitrates. It was the best media from my experience. I wish you the best work! 

good answer mohd

For a small stream I suggest a short kayak for ease of turning around.  A kayak 8 feet and under can fit into an 8 foot truck box, at least diagonally, something to consider if you have many sites to visit which require putting in at different places along the stream.  This saves time instead of tying the kayak down on top of your vehicle.  The shorter kayak is easier to portage around beaver dams also.

Thanks for sharing Jorge, I know the work of Rocío Londoño. If you have worked on the topic I would like to read the publications, they would be very useful in my research project. Thanks again and I hope to see you soon

Try with Rocfall, from Rocscience.

Very difficult to participate as this is a private hobby investigation of mine. I have been retired from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) , Wallingford, UK for nearly 10 years and while I still have links as a Research Fellow of that organisation, I am not funded by them. If I have any success - of course I will endeavour to get CEH interested.

My recommendation to you at this stage, if you think you might have a use for quadcopter drones in a research sense, is to become familiar with autonomous drones in your country - both from a legal and operational point of view. Begin to identify where such a platform could be used and where it might be more effective and cheaper than current methods of observation. The main problem at present is to do with weight. The payload of affordable quadcopter drones is of the order of a few kgs but even at this low weight  you need to spend $3-4000. This weight limit means that we have to develop new lightweight sensor systems - something that the sensor manufacturers such as Skye and Campbell are currently looking at. However, the operational methodology of autonomous flight with quadcopters is generally the same whether you use large expensive or smaller cheaper quadcopters. Off-the-shelf examples are the DJI Phantom and the Parrot Bebop 2 which retail at about $500. It's not that difficult to make your own as I am doing and the costs then are about $250. Even simple photographic and video surveys of large relatively inaccessible areas such as wetlands, to show seasonal changes in extent and vegetation cover, are achievable with currently available equipment. 

No he's my brother, his project is USB encryption, mine is losing portable storage devices. There's 14 questions mainly multiple choice 2 minutes max.

Thanks

Ian

In addition to the above answers, you might see if you are able to create a project through the Zooniverse platform (https://www.zooniverse.org/), as they now have a "build your own project" feature. It is doesn't fit your needs, perhaps contact the developers,whom are located in the US and UK from my understanding. Alternatively, you could explore if local NGOs or museums would have interest in your project and helping you develop your own database that citizen scientists can contribute. An Australian example of a project collective supported by a museum is the Bowerbird project (bowerbirds famously collect things for the nesting sites, so the project name is metaphorical rather than literal: http://www.bowerbird.org.au/). It might also be worth checking SciStarter (http://scistarter.com/index.html), which is a project finder, to see if anyone else is doing a similar project you could collaborate with.

Thanks very much Steven,

I have shared these resources with my honors thesis student.

Cheers, Jim

Experiments - I'm not sure - but in Australia both these groups are certainly well set up to detect changes... http://reeflifesurvey.com/ and http://www.redmap.org.au/

I'm trying indiegogo now. I research child abuse effects on the brain and feel it is intuitive for lay people. It is tough to get people in your networks to respond. 

The best source for grant opportunity is found at the following website: Terra Viva Grants. You'll get a full list and deadlines of a bunch of them... Good luck.

In the Netherlands we've used Batloggres of Elekon and let people place those in their backyard and then have them pass the Batlogger on (Hopping Detectors). It is a easy to use real-time recorder with free (!) identification software of good quality (Batexplorer/Batscope). It can store up to 128Gig of recording on a sd card. The identification software is easy to use, also for less experienced batworkers. And you can quickly identify 95% of the recordings as Pip pip so you can concentrate on the remainder for diversity (rare species) and use the 95% for activity...

Compared to EM3 the microfones on the Batloggers are senitive and picked up more calls in general and more  calls of the low frequency group. That migth ofcourse change in the future.

As a relatieve measure of activity (and certainly not # animals) we used #passages (a passage is one recording, one recording can hold several calls). 

We started to use the same divice for several other citizen science projects. People find it very easy to use and the recordings are good and results are surprising (rare species picked up in locations we didnt expect them).

Well worth a try in my opinion!

Hope this helps.

I agree. We need easier ways to help researchers to share data and publications and to  get credit for their work. Impactstory could be helpful in this respect.

'Impactstory is an open-source, web-based tool that helps researchers explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products—from traditional ones like journal articles, to emerging products like blog posts, datasets, and software. By helping researchers tell data-driven stories about their impacts, we're helping to build a new scholarly reward system that values and encourages web-native scholarship.'

Hi,

you can consult this article: Gregg G. Van Ryzin (2013): An Experimental Test of the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Theory of Citizen Satisfaction. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 32, No. 3, 597–614 (2013)

I agree that data quality is a major problem in citizen science and crowdsourcing. Our group at Memorial University of Newfoundland has been working on this problem for the past few years. We argue that in addition to expertise data quality is rooted in the way we model citizen science applications (e.g., in the way we do database design).

Please feel free to refer to some of the arguments about participation-data quality trade-off, and data quality as a function of conceptual modeling:

Thanks a lot!

We are actually just working on a green paper regarding citizen science, where policy recommendations should be given to the EU in order to support citizen science. Citizen science in schools is one of the aspects we want to address there.

If you want to contribute, there is still an open call: http://www.socientize.eu/?q=eu/content/call-contributors-citizen-science-green-paper

Hi!

In my research field, Astronomy, the Galaxy Zoo project (http://data.galaxyzoo.org/) has been a huge successful citizen science project. The project consisted in the visual classification of hundreds of thousands of galaxies and around 100000 people contributed to the classifications. The outcome of these work have been several research papers and I even profited from this huge work in one of my papers.

I've seen that right now there is a Galaxy Zoo 2 project together with several similar projects in the Zoouniverse website (https://www.zooniverse.org/) with more than 800000 people registered.

I think that in the Zoouniverse website you can find ideas that can help you.

Cheers!

You might be interested in the dissertation of Seth Cooper who won the ACM Dissertation Award this year. The title is "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games," and he "used" computer gamers to solve some hard problems in bio-chemistry by representing research problems as puzzles.

There is a pdf at http://gradworks.umi.com/35/01/3501867.html (but its quality is quite low).