Public Engagement in Biodiversity Research

A major challenge faced by 21^st century ecologists is understanding how biodiversity will be affected by global environmental change. This is because biodiversity research requires large quantities of data on how the genetic, taxonomic and functional composition of communities is changing over space and time. One solution is to use nontraditional sources of data including traditional knowledge, sector-specific data (e.g., agriculture, fisheries), and information collected by citizens. For instance, farm-based data has suggested that crop biodiversity can buffer crop yield against environmental variability.  However, nontraditional data sources also present important challenges due to issues of data quality (effort control, standardization, grain, extent, and verification) and analysis. To address whether nontraditional data could effectively contribute to biodiversity science, we used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively assess the scope, scale, and quality of one emerging branch of nontraditional data: citizen science. Citizen science is growing exponentially in popularity (ten-fold increase since 1990), with some programs reaching global and centenary scales. The monetary value of citizens engaged in biodiversity-oriented programs globally could easily approach the NSF’s annual budget ($6.8 billion). Current programs monitor a surprising diversity of life, including all vertebrate classes, at least five major invertebrate phyla, many plant families, and even bacteria and protozoa; although there is a bias towards temperate terrestrial ecosystems. Programs focusing on taxonomic approaches to biodiversity far outnumbered functional or genetic approaches.  Although a majority of program data are readily accessible, our results suggest that citizen science is still largely untapped as a scientific tool (less than 20% of programs collect data published in peer-reviewed scientific articles).  Program scale, organization type housing the program, and quality control (data standardization, taxonomic identification training) influenced the likelihood of publication. Because citizen science programs emphasize both science and education, participation may translate to greater scientific literacy at the individual level, and literate volunteers may collect data for a lifetime. If society is going to make positive and pervasive environmental decisions to discover, study, and sustain global biodiversity, Earth’s human capital must be engaged, not dissuaded, from science, and biodiversity scientists must embrace nontraditional data, including citizen science.