It can be argued that the original citizen scientists were individuals like Thomas Jefferson, Gilbert White, Charles Darwin, John Burroughs, and Henry David Thoreau, essentially amateurs engaging an interest, indeed a hobby. Thoreau for example documented in great detail the phenology of many species at Walden Pond. [1] Since the history of nature writing is that of individuals who were not scientists, but amateurs, there is some basis to this argument. As a rule, however, science and scientists are impartial. Amateur naturalists tend towards impassioned. The sample sets of information, much like mine, even over a great deal of time would be limited, largely mensurative, more qualitative than quantitative, or simply empirical.

Prior to 1900, there were several collaborative scientific efforts involving amateurs, notably in weather and astronomy.[2] The earliest example of what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology calls PPSR[3] —Public Participation in Scientific Research— and that is still ongoing, is the Audubon Christmas bird count that began in 1900.[4] Indeed, birds have played an important role in the development of both our understanding of and a means of developing a definition for citizen science. That leads inevitably to what may have been the biggest player in citizen science, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The term citizen science is attributed to Alan Irwin, a sociologist, but it was Rick Bonney, Director of Education at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at the time, who is credited with having first applied the term citizen science, in the context of ecological science, as an alternative to amateur science, in 1995.[5] The term citizen science first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014.[6] The Cornell Lab of Ornithology currently defines citizen science as “projects in which volunteers pair with scientists to answer real-world questions.”[7]

The evolution of citizen science has not all been smooth sailing. Scientists were resistant to giving citizens a role in data gathering for several reasons. Firstly, there was the pervasive attitude that only trained scientists, certainly not the amateurs that represent American nature writing, could perform the tasks required to produce peer-reviewed publishable science. For amateurs to be able to do such tasks, experimental research would have to be designed in a certain way that “regular” people could accurately gather usable data, and the scientists might need to provide training as well.[8] One of the issues with “usable” data is that scientists gather data to publish, if the data would not lead to publication, then what was the point?[9]

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From the time Bonney —and Irwin— first used the term citizen science to describe public participation in scientific research, global internet usage went from less than 1% of the population to almost 50%.[10] That huge expansion of usage coincided with an expansion of the ability to capture and manage data as well as the acceleration of social media usage. That expansion resolved one of the scientific community’s stressors, the issue of questionable data was lessened by volume, effectively a huge sample size. There was still the pressure to publish peer-reviewed results.[11] In part due to increased internet usage and technological advances, volunteer contributions to scientific research tend to consist of collecting data for scientists to analyze and interpret, or the cumbersome but necessary job of analyzing data previously collected by scientists. However, hand-held mobile devices and the popularity of social media also conspired to give many people a voice.[12] And, citizen science is uniquely qualified to respond to the concerns of the citizenry. It is no surprise then that water quality, climate change, phenology, invasive species, species inventories, local environmental issues, and bringing science to children and the general population have moved to the forefront of research efforts.[13]

While many citizen science projects, including some of those listed below, are ongoing and thriving with scientists at the helm, in some ways nature study has come full circle, back in the hands of passionate amateurs who can partner with scientifically-trained professionals. Scientific understanding is being shared peer to peer, amateur to amateur, via social media networks focused on communal knowledge. It seems to me that, the electronic exchange of information has not only enabled citizens, amateur scientists, to provide researchers with a large and quickly obtainable data set, but provided via social media, an opportunity for those amateurs to engage in discourse, citizen scientist to citizen scientist, freeing science from the ivory tower.[14] I feel strongly that the public —the citizenry— must be a driving force in environmentally focused scientific research, both to foster a scientifically literate public and to encourage personal investment in the results.

Below I have included a variety of research venues: governmental, academic, private non-profit, and social network in order to illustrate the breadth of projects that are happening. At the same time, I have chosen to focus on the Hudson Valley and New York, the primary locale of this website.