The power of citizen science to generate open data

We live in a connected world, where we all carry a mobile device that allows us to capture our environment and share it with whoever we want through social networks or different tools. This allows us to maintain contact with our loved ones even if we are thousands of kilometers away, but ... What if we also take advantage of this circumstance to enrich scientific research? We would be talking about what is known as citizen science.

Citizen science seeks "general public engagement in scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge or with their tools and resources". This definition is taken from the Green Paper on Citizen Science, developed in the framework of the European project Socientize (FP7), and explain us some of the keys to citizen science. In particular, citizen science is:

• Participatory: Citizens of all types can collaborate in different ways, through the collection of information, or by making their experience and knowledge available to the research. This mixture of profiles creates a perfect atmosphere for innovation and new discoveries.
• Volunteer: Given that participation is often altruistic, citizen science projects need to be aligned with the demands and interests of society. For this reason, projects that awaken the social conscience of citizens (for example, those related to environmentalism) are common.
• Efficient: Thanks to the technological advances that we mentioned at the beginning, samples of the environment can be captured with greater ubiquity and immediacy. In addition, it facilitates the interconnection, and with it the cooperation, of companies, researchers and civil society. All this generate cost reduction and agile results.
• Open: The data, metadata and publications generated during the investigation are published in open and accessible formats. This fact makes information easier to reuse and facilitate the repetition of research investigations to ensure its accuracy and soundness.

In short, this type of initiative seeks to generate a more democratic science that responds to the interests of all those involved, but above all, responds to the interest of citizens. And that generates information that can be reused in favour of society. Let's see some examples:

• Mosquito Alert: This project seeks to fight against the tiger mosquito and the yellow fever mosquito, species that transmit diseases such as Zika, Dengue or Chikungunya. In this case, citizen participation consists in sending photographs of insects observed in the environment that are likely to belong to these species. A team of professionals analyzes the images to validate the findings. The data generated allows to monitor and make predictions about their behavior, which helps control their expansion. All this information is shared openly through GBIF España.
• Sponsor a rock: With the objective of favoring the conservation of the Spanish geological heritage, the participants in this project commit to visit, at least once a year, the place of geological interest that they have sponsored. They will have to warn of any action or threat that they observe (anomalies, aggressions, pillaging of minerals or fossils ...). The information will help enrich the Spanish Inventory of Places of Geological Interest.
• RitmeNatura.cat: The project consists of following the seasonal changes in plants and animals: when flowering is, the appearance of new insects, the changes in bird migration ... The objective is to control the effects of the climate change. The results can be downloaded in this link.
• Identification of near-Earth asteroids: Participants in the project will help identify asteroids using astronomical images. The Minor Planet Center (organism of the International Astronomical Union responsible for the minor bodies of the Solar System) will evaluate the data to improve the orbits of these objects and estimate more accurately the probability of a possible impact with the Earth. You can see some of the results here.
• Arturo: An area where citizen science can bring great advantages is in the training of artificial intelligences. This is the case of Arturo, an automatic learning algorithm designed to determine which the most optimal urban conditions are. To do this, collaborators must answer a questionnaire where they will choose the images that best fit their concept of a habitable environment. The objective is to help technicians and administrations to generate environments aligned with the needs of citizens. The data generated and the model used can be downloaded at the following link.

If you are interested in knowing more projects of this type, you can visit the Spanish Citizen Science webpage whose objective is to increase knowledge and vision about citizen science. It includes the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology and the Ibercivis Foundation. A quick look at the projects section will let you know what kind of activities are being carried out. Maybe you find one of your interest...