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Community scientists — even children — produce usable data for researchers

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July 2, 2022 at 7:23 a.m. EDT
A family examines tidal pools in Santa Barbara, Calif. (iStock)
2 min

Citizen-science projects turn ordinary people into researchers, and in recent years such efforts have abounded, tackling everything from astronomy to weather information contained in 19th-century whaling ship logs.

But how good is the data these projects generate?

A study in the journal Research Ideas and Outcomes has an answer: Community scientists do surprisingly well in producing accurate data that, in turn, can further scientific research — even when the participants are young children.

The research was undertaken by students and staff at the Field Museum in Chicago, which invited museumgoers to participate in a community science project that measured the leaves of liverworts.

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The tiny, mosslike plants are extremely sensitive to temperature and moisture and can be used to monitor climate change. They’re also really hard to see, so museumgoers measured microscopic imagery of their leaves using a large touch screen.

Over the course of two years, participants were able to measure thousands of the leaves. Then, a Roosevelt University professor worked with her undergraduate mathematics class to analyze the data.

To everyone’s surprise, the majority of the data was usable, and all age groups produced high-quality information. Even the youngest participants produced great data; just over half of the measurements done by children under 10 was usable, and 41 percent of data produced by young children who weren’t being helped by adults or others was usable.

Not surprisingly, adults produced the most high-quality data, with 77 percent of their data passing muster. The adults did as well as professional scientists at producing usable measurements.

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“This study demonstrates the wonderful scientific outcomes that occur when an entire community comes together,” Melanie Pivarski, an associate professor of mathematics at Roosevelt University and the study’s lead author, said in a news release.

The benefits didn’t stop with science: It was a chance for participants to learn and engage with not just science but also each other as they participated in a communal project. Further projects could produce even more benefit, the researchers write.

“Scientists, who have more specimens than taxonomists can measure or observe,” they write, can use crowdsourced measurements to “accelerate” scientific discovery — even as they provide fun fodder for museumgoers.