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The history of public participation in ecological research
Abstract
Members of the public have for centuries recorded their observations of the natural world, including plant and animal distribution and phenology, water quality, weather data, and astronomical phenomena. Given the relatively recent growth of ecological research as a professional field of study, the historical contributions of amateurs to ecology can be easily overlooked. To better understand long‐term changes in ecosystems, researchers are now revisiting many of these historical datasets collected by non‐professionals. Over the past 100 years, scientific organizations have increasingly included volunteers in large‐scale monitoring projects to broaden the geographical extent and sample size of observations. We believe that a renewed interest in citizen science, enriched with the perspective and data provided by the long tradition of public participation in science, will broaden the engagement of the public in ecological research and lead to new scientific insights.
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Cited by
Next Steps for Citizen Science
Bonney, R., Shirk, J. L., Phillips, T. B., Wiggins, A., Ballard, H. L., Miller-Rushing, A. J., & Parrish, J. K. (2014) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1251554 · Cited by 1,253
Self-citationGeospatial big data handling theory and methods: A review and research challenges
Li, S., Dragicevic, S., Castro, F. A., Sester, M., Winter, S., Coltekin, A., Pettit, C., Jiang, B., Haworth, J., Stein, A., et al. (2016) · ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing · doi:10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2015.10.012 · Cited by 749
The diversity and evolution of ecological and environmental citizen science
Pocock, M. J. O., Tweddle, J. C., Savage, J., Robinson, L. D., & Roy, H. E. (2017) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172579 · Cited by 359
Sharing biodiversity data: citizen scientists’ concerns and motivations
Ganzevoort, W., van den Born, R. J. G., Halffman, W., & Turnhout, S. (2017) · Biodiversity and Conservation · doi:10.1007/s10531-017-1391-z · Cited by 133
“Since volunteer or enthusiast natural history research is actually older than its professionalised counterpart (Bois et al. 2011; Miller-Rushing et al. 2012), we argue that cooperation between biodiversity researchers and citizen scientists is a more productive perspective than researchers making…”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Miller-Rushing, A., Primack, R., & Bonney, R.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2012-08
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 285-290
- ISSN
- 1540-9295 (ISSN-L)
- 1540-9309
- OpenAlex
- W1998918746
- Cited by
- 589
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 198.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Miller-Rushing, A., Primack, R., & Bonney, R. (2012). The history of public participation in ecological research. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.1890/110278
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
