Citizens are more than ecological sensors: Opportunities and challenges for engaging the public in experimental ecology

Citizen science is all the rage. Humans live in practically every ecosystem on earth, many of them keen to learn about their environments. What wonderful opportunities for ecologists to get tons of observations from volunteers on the ground! Talk about a sentient distributed sensor network keeping a close eye on changing ecosystems! But people do a lot more than observe and measure; they also build and manipulate. Design a clever experiment with clear protocols, learn to collaborate with non-ecologists, and you can do experimental ecology to test fundamental theories, about species assembly, disturbance, and many unanswered questions in ecology.