It is becoming increasingly common for scientists to engage the public in collecting data and “doing” science. It is a go-to scheme for meeting NSF’s broader impacts requirement and has helped ecologists, animal behaviorists, conservationists, and evolutionary biologists identify patterns in the abundance and distributions of animals, plants, and microbes from people’s backyards, organized bio-blitzes, and public lands. With proper filtering to ensure data quality, scientists have benefited from the effort of committed volunteers. Although the public often feels good about helping generate meaningful data, they do not always fully understand the science that they are helping to perform. When they do, they not only become champions of the projects and advocates for evidence-based reasoning, they often provide novel insights and ask penetrating questions that can expand the scope of research by incorporating different perspectives.

In our Inspire session, speakers and panelists will illustrate and discuss how “putting the science into citizen science” not only improves the science but democratizes it by demystifying it. Presenters will discuss methodologies that engage the public in practicing science and demonstrate both how results have been improved and how participants’ understanding of the issues, taxa, and data has benefitted. Ideas such as the co-creation of science questions and protocols, presenting research results for the public rather than only peer-review, and designing research to meet the needs of the public itself are changing the way we perform ecological research. Presentations will be followed by discussion of challenges and opportunities for citizen science in ecological research.