Bridging the Citizen Science Gap

With more participatory research projects based in developed countries, biodiversity data has major holes. Some researchers are trying to change that.

Back in the spring of this year, the media more or less declared a global insect apocalypse. The coverage was based largely on data from 73 insect studies, much of which came from insect surveys, which rely on volunteers, and other work done by citizen scientists — lay people who went out and collected insects, recorded their locations, assembled data, and shared it with trained scientists. Their findings, compiled in a scientific paper, suggested that 40 percent of the world’s insect species are threatened with extinction.

photo of farmers
Some researchers are trying to bring citizen science to developing countries using technologies such as phone apps, software, and interactive websites. This has especially become more common with farming-related research. Photo by Biodiversity International.

However, of these 73 studies, only 20 percent came from countries outside of North America and Europe. The global south, meanwhile, which is home to 12 of world’s 19 most biodiverse countries (14 if you count Venezuela and Ecuador, which are equatorial), was almost entirely left out, in part, because there just hasn’t been as much citizen science there.

Even in the insect study itself, the authors wrote that, “Because the overwhelming majority of long-term surveys have been conducted in developed countries, particularly in the northern hemisphere, this review is geographically biased and does not adequately cover trends in tropical regions, where information on insect biodiversity is either incomplete or lacking.”

“There are enormous knowledge gaps because there are so many insect species living in understudied countries,” adds Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex.

It’s hard to study global biodiversity if we’re leaving out a good chunk of the globe. But can geographic expansion of citizen science projects help fill some of the research gaps?

Citizen science includes anything from gathering data on local birds to checking plants for fungal diseases to counting and categorizing insects. It can be vital part of the scientific process, especially as funding continues to get slashed for more established scientific and agricultural extension work in the US and abroad.

But successful citizen science projects measuring changes over time often require long-term institutional knowledge and data, things that institutions in developing countries may not have. The United Kingdom, for example, has over 50 years of comprehensive data on butterflies, but in general, it’s rare to have that kind of long-term data set.

Time can also be a constraint. “People in developing countries don’t have the time to spend, just for the fun of it, counting butterflies or beetles,” Goulson says.

In part because of this, when it comes to insects, there is very little information about either historic or current populations in Africa, South America, and Asia. “It boils down to that we have data for some insect groups in some parts of Europe and North America, really,” Goulson says.

The data gaps extend beyond insects. Another example is weather research and forecasting. In a blog written for Zooninverse, an online platform for citizen science, Robbie Parks, a PhD student at London College, wrote about this problem.

“Data from … ground weather stations is the fuel for forecasting extreme weather,” he wrote. “Developing countries like Bangladesh, however, suffer from a lack of essential weather measurement infrastructure.”

He also observes an uneven geographic distribution when it comes to Zooninverse contributors. “Currently, those actively participating are mainly from English-speaking countries, as a combined 64 percent originate from the UK or the USA, with only 2 percent from developing countries.”

Overall, it is difficult to get an accurate sense of the number of citizen science projects around the world, and by extension, where they are located. Indeed, these determinations would depend in the first place on how you even define citizen science. There are the more official citizen science projects, of course, run through universities, government agencies, and non-profits. There are local and regional interest groups, like bird and butterfly enthusiasts for example, gathering their own data and publishing it or passing it on to researchers. And then there are individuals, like gardeners, who may make scientific discoveries in the course of their daily activities.

Even farming is a form of citizen science, according to Sean Ryan, a Citizen Science Fellow at North Carolina State. “A lot of the work that’s been done in agriculture hasn’t been called citizen science.”

Some researchers are taking notice , and trying to bring citizen science to developing countries using technologies such as phone apps, software, and interactive websites. This has especially become more common with farming-related research. A very straightforward example is farmers using WhatsApp chat groups to share information with one another and with agricultural agents and scientists. A higher tech example is the use of phone apps like Nuru that use machine learning to help farmers identify pests in their fields. It requires only that farmers take a picture of a pest-damaged leaf and upload it through the app. In addition to helping farmers, the app passes the information on back to researchers, enabling them to map pest distribution and movements

There are also more formal projects being set up in developing countries. One project, the Umubu Radar, is developing a web reporting platform in Rwanda to monitor malaria mosquitos. Users can share their observations about mosquitos and help collect data on the species. There’s also a software program developed for the Kenya Forest Service called kMacho that allows users to collect information for monitoring and management of resources. They can take photos when, for example, they see potential illegal activity in the forest, and collect geographic information about their location; all of this information can then be stored in a central location. And a couple of years ago, scientists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology held a conference entitled “Unlocking Africa’s potential for citizen science” to evaluate which kinds of projects would be best to implement on the continent. Overall, these new projects rely on technology and access to social networks, which can help connect potential citizen scientists even in remote areas.

Of course, these efforts are still limited by certain constraints. Access to computers and phones in some parts of the world could pose a challenge, for example, as could language barriers between citizen scientists and formally trained ones. But as citizen science becomes more widespread, we may be able to get a clearer picture of the state of the many different plants, and animals, and ecosystems distributed across the world. And we might also get a better sense of just how global the insect apocalypse really is.

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