Authors
Prof. Austin Mast, Department of Biological Science, Florida State University, amast@fsu.edu, Board Member of the Citizen Science Global Partnership
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) corresponded with over 2,000 individuals in service to his groundbreaking work. Today, we continue to combine information-sharing networks with scientific methodologies in revolutionary ways, now at lightning speeds. Our networks might involve new technologies, like remote sensing, but often people on-the-ground remain central to success. Some of those people bring advanced training, while others deliver complementary value—local knowledge, fresh perspectives, advocacy, weight as political constituents, and more. These enriched networks operate as “citizen science” or “community-based monitoring” (here referenced collectively as the former). For this second posting in the citizen science blog series, we chose to focus on biodiversity because some of our biggest citizen science wins to-date are in this area, and they illustrate the opportunities for rapid response to rapid change. What we find, however, is that even bigger wins are on the horizon, if we respond to the early demonstrations of value with strategic next steps—steps in which the UN fosters a community of practice focused on citizen science throughout the organization.
Biodiversity boggles the mind, yet it rewards our efforts to understand it. Earth’s estimated 8.7 million species include countless individual organisms across diverse habitats, each possessing unique traits that shape complex interactions with one another and their environments. These biological resources generate approximately US$4 trillion in economic value annually, and half of all current pharmaceutical drugs are derived from or inspired by molecules produced by these non-human organisms. Despite biodiversity’s central importance to humanity’s future, our understanding of this vast subject remains strikingly incomplete.
This is at least partly because our individual experiences with organisms have historically been, and largely remain, local. Individuals and communities have learned to differentiate what will nourish from what will poison from what will heal, often, in the case of communities, over many generations of trial-and-error. Or, these days, we have learned how to determine whether the bird in our binoculars is a new species for our life list.
This means that it is impossible for the small number of scientists and policymakers to gain much more than a very patchy view of biodiversity without engaging many people in many places at many times. That is, we are called to become modern-day Darwin’s—creating, growing, valuing, and effectively leveraging networks of people at scales unimaginable in the 19th century.
Technological innovations—especially the internet and smart-phones, but, increasingly, AI and computer vision—have made broadened participation in biodiversity-focused study relatively easy and powerful, where the innovations are available. iNaturalist (inaturalist.org) brings together 8.5 million registered users who have contributed about 250 million biodiversity observations to-date, and eBird (ebird.org) collects a whopping 100 million bird observations annually, with the participation growth rate climbing about 20% year-over-year. These two citizen science projects are THE LARGEST single-sources of data at the world’s aggregator of biodiversity information (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; GBIF.org) and have been cited in about 6,500 and 1,200 studies, respectively. For comparison, the records shared to GBIF by the Natural History Museum (London, UK) have been used in about 4,600 studies. Today, citizen science data makes up over two-thirds of the data aggregated by GBIF.
Clearly, citizen science data is a valued resource, and it nicely complements our historical baseline of biodiversity data from specimens collected over the past few centuries held by museums. Caitlin Mandeville and colleagues (2023; Nature Communications Earth & Environment) showed, further, that the majority of new biodiversity data shared at GBIF is from citizen science projects and that the disparity of contributions of this type of data from protected areas, in particular, is far outstripping the contribution from other sources (e.g., collecting by the world’s museums). Photographing biodiversity is far easier than acquiring collecting permits, though specimens continue to provide unique opportunities for study, such as DNA sequencing.
Increasingly, the United Nations and other international bodies, such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, are capitalizing on citizen science. As mentioned in last month’s blog post by Martin Brocklehurst, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF; 2022) explicitly incorporates citizen science into its monitoring framework. In a recent paper, Finn Danielsen and colleagues (2024, Nature Sustainability) determined that slightly over half (51%) of the 365 indicators in the GBF monitoring framework could involve citizen science data collection. And similarly, Dilek Fraisl and colleagues (2020, Sustainability Science) determined that 33% of the 244 indicators for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 15 Life on Land, could be addressed by citizen science. These and other burgeoning opportunities for leveraging citizen science have led to the establishment of the Collaborative on Citizen Data by the UN Statistics Division and the production of The Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data (2024).
Collectively, these developments are promising but just the beginning. The Executive Director of the US-based Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences (AAPS), Dr. Jennifer Shirk, describes citizen science as the “power of science for everyone and the power of everyone for science.” What steps can we take to realize a vision of the “power of multi-lateral environmental agreements (MEAs) for everyone and the power of everyone for MEAs”?
The complexity of biodiversity produces many opportunities for citizen science contributions. Scientists convened by the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) identified 21 Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) thought to capture the multifaceted nature of biodiversity, and these informed the GBF monitoring framework. Mark Chandler and colleagues (2017, Biological Conservation) examined the extent to which citizen science programs addressed the EBVs and found both areas of clear current contribution (species occurrence, as well as population abundance, species traits, primary productivity, and secondary productivity to a lesser extent) but also many (the majority of) EBVs where citizen science programs had yet to be employed in significant ways. And they found that citizen science contributions to our monitoring of the EBVs were geographically and taxonomically uneven. What would be required to have a more balanced and eBird- or iNaturalist-scale citizen science project centered on each of the EBVs (and hence more of the GBF indicators)?
About this, Dr. Scott Loarie (CEO of iNaturalist), says
By putting the tools to contribute to biodiversity research in the pocket of anyone with a smartphone, iNaturalist empowers all of the world’s citizens to help catalogue most of the life of Earth. A more intentional growth strategy, built on strong and well-resourced community partnerships, aimed at areas of the planet with high levels of biodiversity will fill critical gaps in our data portfolio and ensure that all participants have access to the data to protect biodiversity. We see the UN as a critical partner in fostering next steps.
There are many moving parts as we build strategy to deliver the power of everyone for MEAs via citizen science, especially around biodiversity. Many of the needed pieces are present: global collaborations around information sharing (e.g., GBIF, GEO BON), organizations building regional (e.g., AAPS) and international (the Citizen Science Global Partnership, CSGP) communities of practice, a few blockbuster examples delivering citizen science data for science and policymaking (e.g., iNaturalist, eBird), new frameworks for citizen science data integration (e.g., the UNSD’s Copenhagen Framework), and complementary technologies (e.g., remote sensing, AI, computer vision). However, as yet, we have only taken initial steps to combine these in service to leveraging citizen science for global biodiversity goals. How do we catalyze additional steps, making each faster? By developing a vibrant UN citizen science community of practice.
Citizen science has a vital bottom-up spirit, largely driven by a fundamental need for these projects to have local relevance to participants. However, instances of top-down leadership have led to big advances as well. This was seen in the US with the 2015 Memo from the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (subject “Addressing Societal and Scientific Challenges through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing”) and then the 2017 Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act. These fostered the development of expertise on citizen science in federal agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, leading to a robust federal citizen science community of practice that became a critical partner with the broader citizen science community in the US. Similar steps to foster a citizen science community of practice at the UN, as encouraged by the Charter for Citizen Science discussed in last month’s blog post by Martin Brocklehurst, and to partner with CSGP and other innovators in the global citizen science community promise to deliver our next, even bigger, wins for biodiversity.
Let’s work together to unleash the power of everyone for the MEAs for Darwin-scale advances for science, society, and biodiversity with citizen science.
Further reading
Chandler, M., et al. (2017) Contribution of citizen science towards international biodiversity monitoring. Biological Conservation 213: 280–294. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.09.004
Danielsen, F., et al. (2024) Involving citizens in monitoring the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Nature Sustainability 7: 1730–1739. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01447-y
Fraisl, D., et al. (2020) Mapping citizen science contributions to the UN sustainable development goals. Sustainability Science 15: 1735–1751. https://doi.org/10.1007/s1162 5-020-00833-7
Mandeville, C., et al. (2023) Participatory monitoring drives biodiversity knowledge in global protected areas. Nature Communications Earth & Environment 4: 240. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00906-2
Acknowledgements
Karen Soacha, Martin Brocklehurst, and Dilek Fraisl provided very helpful comments on a draft of the blog post.
DISCLAIMER:
The views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of UNSPBF or any United Nations organization. UNSPBF is dedicated to fostering a balanced, impartial, and equitable space to share science-based perspectives to address the planetary crisis and to boost transparency and accountability across sectors