How Kids (And Other Amateurs) Are Improving Science
Citizen Scientists Jon Gilbert Fox/PSUA new report takes an in-depth dive into citizen science. Enlisting non-scientists, the researchers say, could revolutionize how we collect data. Scientists often spread themselves too thin trying to gather and monitor vast amounts of data, so why not outsource some of that work to non-scientists? It's only getting easier to collaborate with citizen scientists. Volunteers can enlist through social media, gather field data through a smartphone app, then put all of that into an organized web database fresh for the analyzing. A review commissioned by the UK Environmental Observation Framework (UK-EOF) highlights some of the work that citizen scientists have done. A team looked at 234 projects and determined that pro bono volunteers offered a cost-effective way of collecting data whether they were nature fans or kids. The researchers also found that volunteer contributions could have immediate effects outside academia: With more data than...