Citizen science has become a major component of ecological research over the past decade. As our speakers have highlighted, citizen science has provided a wealth of data to answer long-standing questions in ecology as well as increasing ecological literacy of the public. Moreover, citizen science is increasingly being conducted in a manner that falls within the big data revolution. Hence, the marriage of citizen science and big data provide an opportunity to address a wide variety of new and old ecological questions. Furthermore, large citizen science projects have provided such a large amount of data across different spatial and temporal scales that ecologists have the opportunity to conduct large syntheses and comparisons.
Results/Conclusions
Building on our speakers' discussions, we highlight such promises and future opportunities of citizen science.While citizen science has already provide a wealth of data and answered many important ecological questions, there is a great promise and future for the field. Such promises and opportunities include continued integration of citizen science data with research coordinated networks, museum collections, and existing environmental data. By working to integrate citizen science and big data the opportunity exists to both continue addressing basic ecological questions as well as many of applied and conservation challenges the world currently faces.