IMPROVING CITIZEN SCIENCE OBSERVATIONS FOR GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY MONITORING
STUDENT SEMINAR IN BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION
Citizen science, i.e. the engagement of non-scientists in research, not being new, had an impressive development in the last few years. The emergence of many technologies related to internet facilities, allowed a huge increase in public participation, data collection and awareness for conservation, resulting in valuable and meaningful benefits for society.
During leisure activities and everyday lives, citizens collect information about the presence of species, which is mostly lost for science purposes. However, this casuistic data, registered in an organized manner, can be useful to the scientific community, for research and management.
My PhD aims to understand the main challenges that these citizen science projects face and how they can be improved to contribute to a better knowledge of global biodiversity. This will be done along four major objectives, namely: compare databases across different countries; investigate what motivates the participants that contribute to these databases and the impacts that such initiatives have on them and their volunteer activities; experiment how different games and social information can be used to improve the quantity and quality of data; assess the effectiveness of the data in citizen science databases. The database BioDiversity4All.org will be used as a case study, and compared with other initiatives worldwide.
Patrícia Tiago is a biologist, born in Lisbon, in 1975. Patrícia obtained her MSc in Land and Environmental Planning from Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2005. Her research interests include involvement of people with science, specifically with biodiversity and biodiversity changes. In her PhD, developed in the context of the THEOECO group, under the supervision of Henrique Miguel Pereira and Margarida Santos Reis, Patrícia is working in with citizen science databases to increase global biodiversity knowledge and to improve the data collected in those projects. From 2002 until 2013, Patricia worked with environmental education and science dissemination for different kinds of audiences and, in 2009 she was part of a team that created a Portuguese biodiversity database - http://www.biodiversity4all.org.
Image credits: Patrícia Tiago