Tag Archives: Citizen Science Data

10th Anniversary Volume 5: Extracting Signals of Change from Noisy Ecological Data

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Post provided by Nick J. B. Isaac

To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we are highlighting an article from each volume to feature in the Methods.blog.

For Volume 5, we have selected ‘Statistics for citizen science: extracting signals of change from noisy ecological data’ by Isaac et al. (2014).  In this post, the authors discuss the background and key concepts of the article, and the application of the article for assessing biodiversity occurrence datasets.

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Ideas Brought to Life Through BES Hackathon

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Post provided by Tom August

Introduction to the Hackathon

Hackathon participants with their awards.

Hackathons have become a regular feature in the data-science world. Get a group of people with a shared interest together, give them data, food, and a limited amount of time and see what they can produce (often with prizes to be won). Translated into the world of academia as research hackathons, these events are a fantastic way to foster collaboration, interdisciplinary working and skills sharing.

The Quantitative Ecology hackathon was an intense day of coding resulting in creative and innovative research ideas using social and ecological data. Teams worked through the day to develop their ideas with support from experts in R, open science and statistics. We ended up with five projects addressing questions from, ‘Who has the least access to nature?’ to ‘Where should citizen scientists go to collect new data?’.

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Being Certain about Uncertainty: Can We Trust Data from Citizen Science Programs?

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Post provided by VIVIANA RUIZ GUTIERREZ

Citizen Science: A Growing Field

Thousands of volunteers around the world work on Citizen Science projects. ©GlacierNPS

Thousands of volunteers around the world work on Citizen Science projects. ©GlacierNPS

As you read this, thousands of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds are collecting information for over 1,100 citizen science projects worldwide. These projects cover a broad range of topics: from volunteers collecting samples of the microbes in their digestive tracts, to tourists providing images of endangered species (such as tigers) that are often costly to survey.

The popularity of citizen science initiatives has been increasing exponentially in the past decade, and the wealth of knowledge being contributed is overwhelming. For example, almost 300,000 participants have submitted around 300 million bird observations from 252 countries worldwide to the eBird program since 2002. Amazingly, rates of submissions have exceeded 9.5 million observations in a single month! Continue reading →