The roles of organizations in environmental citizen science - Cases from environmental monitoring in the UK
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2016-07-14
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en
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Abstract
In the past decade, citizen science has experienced a significant development in both scope and scale. Especially in environmental monitoring, where massive data collection is required, citizen science has been increasingly adopted by various organisations. For citizen science projects running at different geographic scales, different organisational settings areusually required,which might in turn affect the operation of the projects. Such influence is more significant on large-scale citizen science projects. Thus, it is interesting to look into the organisational settings of citizen science at a large scale, and examine how they influence a project in practice.
Based on a case study of one of the largest citizen science projects in the UK, the research looks into the organisational settings and the regional operation of OPAL. By gathering insights from different stakeholder groups and participating in two engagement events, several issues were discovered from the study: firstly, the operation of OPAL relies largely on the community scientists and the informal network; secondly, the contradiction between the outreach target and the limited staffing leads to relatively low-level engagement; thirdly, low-level participation could also bring about social benefits and lead to positive attitude; finally, the current state of OPAL is not very sustainable due to the funding, staffing and engagement issues, but its members are trying to sustain it in different ways. Regarding all these issues, it is worth rethinking about the balance between the quantity and quality of participation, as well as how to sustain such projects with limited resources
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen