Community science – also known as citizen science – has huge appeal for researchers who want to collect larger datasets and involve the public in their work. But is the data collected in this way any good?
Enabled by technology, community science allows researchers to harness the power of the public interest, using their voluntary contributions to collect data. In this way, scientists can gather and analyze more information more quickly than they could otherwise, and potentially save on research costs too.
But one of the key principles of scientific data collection is accuracy and consistency. What community science offers to traditional research methods is only as good as the quality of the data its participants produce. In a new study, researchers put that quality to the test.
Herbarium collections in museums around the world – of which there are over 3,000, with an estimated 350 million specimens – are being digitized, allowing the public to get ‘closer’ to specimens, without affecting their conservation. But despite digitization, researchers say, museum specimens are still underutilized.
Study author and botanist Matt von Konrat, head of plant collections at the Chicago Field Museum, says community science could change this.
“Crowd-sourced data collection projects… have the potential to accelerate biodiversity discovery and documentation from digital images of scientific specimens,” he notes.
The public interest can speed up the process of manual tasks, such as measuring herbarium specimens. For a museum with thousands of specimens, using the foot traffic of enthusiastic visitors makes a lot of sense.
To test this method, researchers used data from a touchscreen kiosk in a museum exhibit. The kiosk offered participants an animated tutorial on how to measure the lobules (leaf-like structures) of liverwort, a type of plant related to moss.
After viewing the tutorial, participants were shown a randomly selected image of a liverwort specimen from the museum collection, and asked to make their own measurements of its lobules.
The sponsors were instructed to create two intersecting lines across each lobule, each representing width and length. They were asked to create lines that intersected at right angles, and record a measurement for each line in pixels. The images were scaled so that 1 pixel equals 1.05 microns, because liverworts – one of the earliest known land plants – are quite small.
The researchers also sought to collect data on the ages of the participants, broadly grouped as children (10 years and under), teenagers (10 to 18 years), and adults (18+).
To test how ‘good’ each community science data record was, the researchers compared them with one expert using the same methods, to find out if there was a statistically significant difference. The results exceeded their expectations.
The researchers predicted that around 50 percent of measurements would make it through the data cleaning process, and that older age groups would be able to provide much better data than children.
“We didn’t know if children would draw pictures on the touch screen instead of measuring leaves, or if they would be able to follow the tutorial as well as the adults,” said lead researcher, mathematician Melanie Pivarski from Roosevelt University.
But after cleaning and analyzing the community scientists’ data (which included nearly 6,700 measured lobules), the study found that 60 percent of all records matched the experts’ measurements.
“All age groups of young children, families, youth and adults were able to produce high-quality taxonomic datasets, make observations and prepare measurements, and at the same time empower community scientists through authentic contributions to science,” said von Konrat.
Pivarski said they were particularly amazed at how well the children completed the task.
In 2017, the kiosk was part of Specimens: Unlocking the Secrets of Life at the Field Museum. In 2018, it was featured in the Grainger Science Hub, Field Museum member nights, and other events.
In the Specimens exhibit, 41 percent of the data recorded by children (not helped by friends or older relatives) was statistically similar enough to the expert’s measurement to be used for research.
In the Science Hub, 50 per cent of data according to the youngest age group – children under 10 – made the cut.
“This means that children did an amazing job following instructions and taking the measurements .. seriously,” the researchers said in their paper.
While other studies have found that budding citizen scientists can overestimate species diversity, the new findings lend merit to community science projects, suggesting they can indeed be used to engage the public in scientific research, and gather some good data too.
This paper was published in Research Ideas and Results.
