SciStarter Blog

Think Global, Recognize Local: Twitter Chat on Friday, October 23 about “Invisible” Citizen Science

Nicole Esch

Citizen science is nearly everywhere you look. One place you can look — SciStarter — helps millions of people worldwide discover thousands of citizen science projects, events and tools through its searchable database. Though large-scale projects like iNaturalist or projects hosted on Zooniverse may appear more frequently on the national and global stage, local and community-based projects are likely just as numerous — if not more so, based on what I see in the SciStarter Project Finder. 

Using Home-Grown Projects to Address Local Problems

The traditional scientific products of large-scale projects in peer-reviewed literature and subsequent media coverage can make it seem as though large-scale projects are more important than the smaller, community-based efforts. However, I argue that we can collectively address the most pressing existential, environmental issues we face on planet Earth with smaller scale, action-oriented projects that do not necessarily have a goal of publication.

Elevating the visibility of local projects that effectively address issues such as biodiversity, natural resource use and environmental justice in a given community is important in order to promote participant self-efficacy, funding and broader public recognition of strategies that succeed in addressing environmental issues.  

“Invisible” Citizen Science

Caren Cooper uses the phrase “invisible citizen science” to point out that published peer-reviewed papers that rely on citizen science data often fail to credit the help they received from citizen science projects. I want to focus on another type of invisibility: lack of recognition of the impacts of projects UNRELATED to peer-reviewed papers. 

Many projects influence policy, regulation, social justice, natural resource management plans, environmental justice decisions and more, without being part of the system of peer-reviewed publications and subsequent mainstream media attention.

 “Invisible” citizen science, in the context of this discussion, is a shorter way of referring to citizen science projects that:

Join the Conversation

In a Twitter-based #CitSciChat event on October 23 from 9-10 AM ET, I (@nl_esch) explored the importance of and strategies for recognizing the contributions of “invisible” citizen science projects via my Twitter handle with #CitSciChat. Small-scale, grassroots projects can catalyze local climate action, given their tendency to influence change on local scales. Local efforts can customize environmental solutions to make them maximally effective in their unique on-the-ground context, and the combined impact of this targeted local work results in comprehensive global benefit. However, these efforts won’t succeed and spread until local work is celebrated on the global stage, so other communities can learn about it and find inspiration from these models.

To explore these issues, I invited the following guest panelists to discuss these issues with me. I’ll retweeted their responses from my account (@nl_esch):

During this discussion, the above panelists posted responses to questions about “invisible” citizen science on Twitter with #CitSciChat.  The chat took take place Friday, October 23 from 9 – 10 AM ET. You can still retweet and share examples of your favorite small-scale projects to begin increasing the visibility of community-based citizen science!

What will we see when we look at this work, together? 

Selected Posts from #CitSciChat