Citizen science & data

How members of the public collect and analyse scientific data, how data quality is assured, and who owns and governs community and Indigenous data.

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  Community Air Quality Monitoring: A Practical Guide to Low-Cost Sensors and Resident-Led Studies

  How residents and community groups can monitor air pollution with low-cost sensors: what the sensors measure and their limits, choosing and siting devices, collocation and correction, US EPA and WHO reference points, and how community data have fed into policy such as California's AB 617.

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  Data Quality in Citizen Science: How Projects Make Volunteer Data Trustworthy

  How citizen science projects ensure data quality: fitness for purpose, protocols and training, expert validation and consensus, recording effort, calibration of instruments, statistical correction and metadata, with the US EPA's quality assurance handbook for citizen science and key research findings.

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  Indigenous Data Sovereignty: The CARE Principles, OCAP and What They Mean for Researchers

  What Indigenous data sovereignty means, how the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance complement the FAIR principles, the First Nations OCAP principles in Canada, Māori and Aboriginal data sovereignty networks, the Havasupai case, and practical steps for research teams.

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  Open Data and Community Data: How to Share Participatory Research Results Responsibly

  How participatory and citizen science projects can share their data: returning results to participants, open licences, anonymisation and small-number suppression, repositories and data agreements, and when data should not be open, with sources from UNESCO, the UK Data Service and research on report-back.

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  What Is Citizen Science? Definitions, History and the Main Types of Project

  A clear introduction to citizen science: where the term comes from, early examples such as the Christmas Bird Count, the main project models (contributory, collaborative, co-created), what public policy says about it in the US and at UNESCO, and how to find and judge a project.