Jonathan Silvertown

A citizen scientist is any non-professional who collects and/or processes data as part of a scientific enquiry. A century and a half ago, this definition would have fit almost all scientists, most of whom made their living in some other profession. Today, most citizen scientists work with professional counterparts in projects that have been specifically designed or adapted to give amateurs a role, either for the educational benefit of the volunteers themselves or for the benefit of the project. The best examples benefit both. We have been doing citizen science at the Open University for 30 years (e.g. Cook et. al.1986. "Post industrial melanism in the peppered moth." Science 231: 611-613).

Silvertown, J. (2009) A new dawn for citizen science. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 24, 467-471.

Evolution MegaLab was created to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 2009 and has continued since then to collect data from the public and from students on shell polymorphism in the banded snails Cepaea nemoralis and C. hortensis. Collaborators in 15 European countries participated and the MegaLab website is available in 14 languages.

Two papers have so far been published:

Silvertown, J. & 23 others (2011) Citizen Science Reveals Unexpected Continental-Scale Evolutionary Change in a Model Organism. PLoS One, 6, 8.

Worthington, J. P., Silvertown, J., Cook, L. M., Cameron, R. A. D., Dodd, M. E., Greenwood, R. M., McConway, K. J. & Skelton, P. W. (2011) Evolution MegaLab: a case-study in citizen science methods. Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

More and more people are interested in nature and are conscious that so much of what we value is under threat. At the same time, fewer and fewer people can actually identify what they see.

Launched in 2008 with a five-year, £2 million grant from the Big Lottery Fund for England, iSpot has built a nationwide community of tens of thousands of people who are helping each other to observe and learn more about the natural world around them. At the time of writing, we have over 18,000 registered users who have submitted more than 100,000 observations of about 5,500 species. The many eyes of the iSpot community have proved so keen, that hundreds of rarities have been recorded and two species new to Britain have been discovered.

iSpot’s award winning website (www.ispot.org.uk) has been designed to help remedy the gap in the general public’s identification skills. It is pioneering in its approach to supporting learning across the boundary between the informal and formal, using a combination of social networking, informal access to expertise and accredited learning opportunities. Anyone can upload a photograph of animals, plants, fungi or any living organisms they have seen. The photo is then displayed on the iSpot home page where other users can agree with the identification, attach a comment, or add a revised identification.

Correspondence in Nature about iSpot, published 14 Oct 2010