Activity Report on Citizen Science – discoveries from a five year journey

Abstract

Citizen Science evolved from a long tradition in fields, such as biodiversity and meteorology, into almost all scientific fields. Simultaneously, regional and global communities became well organised and interconnected, and we arrived at a situation in which Citizen Science is not only prominent in research and civil society, but also well recognised in political agendas. Over the past five years, we (the Citizen Science team of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), Digital Economy Unit, B.6) explored and helped shaping the uptake of Citizen Science within Europe and world-wide. This report summarizes our main activities. It is organized in different areas of activities that our team was involved in and elaborates on our major work items under each of these clusters - including some selected highlights. These elaborations are synthetic while including illustrative material and refer the interested reader to more detailed explanations that have already been published elsewhere. We close by presenting some of our key lessons learned, and by providing pointers to future work.