Citizen science has been on the rise in the last few years, driven by rapid advancements in technology and several governments encouraging more public participation in research.

Smartphone technology, such as built-in GPS, high-resolution cameras and smart sensors has contributed considerably to this, as has the rise of online networks and digital platforms like iNaturalist.

These make it much simpler for people to upload photos and record real-time data like wildlife locations, noise levels or air quality on the go.

With professional scientists facing massive data gaps when tracking widespread issues like invasive species, climate change and biodiversity loss, these volunteer citizen scientists are crucial to help gather information across huge geographic areas and long timeframes.

Turning Travellers Into Environmental Participants

One of the main areas of citizen science today is in the global tourism sector, with a number of hotels and resorts enabling guests to help with things like coral reef planting and surveying, wildlife tracking and more.

Sun Siyam Iru Fushi in the Maldives, leads conservation snorkelling tours, where guests can help the resident marine biologist in coral planting and surveying, which includes sediment and bleaching surveys.

These surveys usually last over a long time, typically multiple years, so data needs to be frequently collected.

Guests can also help the marine biologist collect naturally detached, living coral fragments and attach these collected fragments onto specially designed steel frames, which are then placed in dedicated underwater parks and lagoon reef areas.

This allows the corals to grow, rebuild habitats and attract more marine life, helping build a healthier reef ecosystem. These frames, which are usually set up in a few different locations to test favourable conditions, can be easily moved in case of events like faster coral bleaching in one location where the water is warmer.

They can also be crucial indicators of marine life, and in many cases, attract species that may not have been seen for a while in a region. Apart from species commonly seen as keystone species, like sea turtles and sharks, these also include grazers.

“Grazers are very important. Grazers are the ones that clean the reef of algae, because in the reef system, there is a competition between the fast-growing sponges and algae, versus slow-growing corals,” Mohamed Shah, marine biologist at Sun Siyam Iru Fushi, told Forbes.

He added: “When grazers are absent from a reef, the algae growth is really quick and they will suffocate the coral fighting for space. So it’s necessary that we have grazers to keep it clean and maintained, so that corals can grow faster.”

Similarly, guests can also adopt a frame, and receive updates about its health twice a year, helping nurture long-term commitment to conservation.

Travellers can help identify sea turtles as well, with the resort partnering with the Olive Ridley project to submit facial scale patterns and match them with the national database. This helps them keep track of surrounding turtles and monitor any growth or injuries.

Other African safari lodges and camps, such as across the Okavango Delta partner with initiatives like the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s eBioAtlas and NatureMetrics. This allows guests to capture environmental DNA (eDNA) to track elusive land mammals, birds and fish populations without disrupting their habitats.

Similarly, resorts like Italy’s Forestis Dolomites allow guests to participate in guided walking expeditions that record local flora changes, monitor alpine forest health and track wildlife distribution across seasons.

Climate Change And Environmental Tracking

Another major way citizen science is being implemented is for climate change and environmental tracking. This crowdsourced data can help scientists monitor acute environmental shifts in real-time across areas far too vast for traditional research teams to cover.

This includes phenology tracking, where volunteers log the timing of seasonal events such as the first bud bursts of spring, bird migrations and insect flower visitations, often through platforms like Nature’s Notebook.

These metrics can greatly highlight how warming temperatures are disrupting ecosystems.

In other cases, coastal communities can help document shoreline changes and log plastic pollution, which can help model ocean currents and identify how rising sea levels affect coastal stability.

Citizen science can also be used to safeguard local watersheds by tracking pollution hotspots. Organized by groups like Earthwatch, WaterBlitz events involve thousands of volunteers to test local rivers and streams using simple chemical kits, which measure nitrates, phosphates and water clarity.

Due to hundreds of points along a river being sampled simultaneously, scientists can quickly pinpoint exactly where agricultural runoff or industrial wastewater is entering a waterway.

Volunteers also count macroinvertebrates or river bugs, since certain species cannot survive in polluted waters.

Similarly, citizen science can be used to assess air quality, through mobile sensors and crowdsourced optical tools.

Tools like iSPEX use add-ons that turn smartphones into spectropolarimeters. By taking photos of the sky, volunteers can measure atmospheric aerosols like dust, smoke and ash, which can help map out urban smog patterns.

This micro-data can also help empower heavily polluted neighbourhoods to present solid evidence of environmental inequities to city planners, which could influence traffic routing and industrial zoning laws.

Disaster Preparedness And Community Mapping

Citizen science is also being heavily used to support disaster preparedness and community mapping.

After severe storms, floods or wildfires, many people upload geotagged photos and sensor data, which can help disaster response teams and calibrate future flood-risk maps.

Using mobile apps, GPS devices and open-access mapping platforms, people can log local vulnerabilities like flood zones, landslide risks and crumbling infrastructure.

These projects usually blend modern crowdsourcing with grassroots and indigenous observations, such as tracking ecological and weather changes, to fill gaps in official data.

Communities can actively work with local authorities and researchers to build open-access hazard maps that can be used by residents.

Citizen science can also be used to build early warning networks, as distributed residents can monitor real-time indicators like rainfall, river levels or volcanic ash fall and broadcast alerts through shared messaging groups.

In some cases, this allows emergency planners to collect hyper-local information at a scale professional teams cannot achieve alone and connect them with routine practices used by local health departments and professional first responders.

The Limits Of Citizen Science

While citizen science can help cover significant gaps in current research, several hurdles remain.

One of the key challenges is data quality and reliability. Accuracy gaps can occur due to variable levels of volunteer skills, training and consistency, while a lack of uniform validation protocols can make it harder to compare datasets across different regions or projects.

Sampling and structural biases are another issue. This is mainly due to volunteers usually collecting data in accessible, populated areas, rather than remote or truly ecologically critical zones.

Many people may also be interested only in popular animals or plants like sea turtles and coral reefs, leaving obscure organisms under-reported.

In several cases, only basic methods are applied, which cannot always capture complex ecological dynamics.

Sometimes, traditional academic and government institutions may hesitate to incorporate citizen data into formal policies as well, which can be a deterrent to participation.

In other cases, resource demands for training, managing and supporting a volunteer network, along with access divides due to gaps in digital infrastructure, funding and technical literacy can pose significant hurdles too.

Blending Citizen And Scientific Data

Given the number of funding and institutional pressures researchers across the world are increasingly dealing with, citizen science can be a vital way of filling in gaps in environmental, biodiversity and climate data.

However, for this data to have a greater impact in institutional and policy contexts, stronger validation frameworks, support and training is necessary. This could help citizen data be more reliable, while also extending to lesser-known species and more remote areas.

Ultimately, citizen science is unlikely to replace professional research. However, as scientific resources are increasingly stretched, combining large-scale volunteer participation with professional expertise could become increasingly important to maintain current levels of environmental research.