Citizen science programs are increasing in number, breadth, and popularity. These programs operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, address myriads of topics, generate volumes of diverse scientific data, and involve... [ view full abstract ]
Citizen science programs are increasing in number, breadth, and popularity. These programs operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, address myriads of topics, generate volumes of diverse scientific data, and involve numerous stakeholders. To be effective, such programs must ask questions, form teams, manage members, identify protocols, collect data, share results, and evaluate success. On face value, these tasks may seem simple. In reality, they are diverse, complex, and demanding of limited resources. To address these challenges, we built CitSci.org (www.citsci.org)—an open, comprehensive, and fully customizable cyber-infrastructure support system for citizen science programs. Our objective was to support the full spectrum of both program and data management needs. We aimed to support both participant management (e.g., different roles and privileges) and data management (e.g., integration, standardization, analysis, visualization, and sharing). Currently, CitSci.org empowers program coordinators to create their own projects; manage members and roles; build data sheets; define protocols (e.g., plot types, measurements, and units); synchronize online and mobile data sheets; streamline data entry; visualize data on tables, maps and charts; automate customized real-time analyses; and get participant feedback using customized surveys. Thus far, CitSci.org has supported 97+ programs resulting in 53,744+ site characteristics and 28,285+ species observations. The programs supported include both bottom-up, co-created efforts and top down, contributory approaches. Here, we discuss the opportunities afforded by CitSci.org to support the needs of citizen science programs. We detail current capabilities, discuss informatics needs for sharing and integrating data, present lessons learned for developers and users alike, and illustrate challenges encountered, possible solutions, and future directions. We conclude by discussing the importance of, and challenges associated with, sharing measurements and units across projects and developing tools that transcend diverse topics while remaining topically relevant.
