Sea Change: Using Citizen Science to Inform Fisheries Management.

Increasing costs are challenging the capacity for resource management agencies to keep up with mounting needs for robust data about fish populations and their habitats. Furthermore, trust among scientists, government agencies, and the public is fundamental to effective fisheries management, and relations among these three groups are increasingly strained when decisions about fishing limits are made (or are perceived to be made) on the basis of limited information or analysis. In the South Atlantic region of the United States, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council has begun building a citizen science program to increase the quantity and quality of data used for fisheries management decisions throughout the region and to build trust and foster mutual understanding among those involved in the process.

The invisible prevalence of citizen science in global research: migratory birds and climate change.

Citizen science is a research practice that relies on public contributions of data. The strong recognition of its educational value combined with the need for novel methods to handle subsequent large and complex data sets raises the question: Is citizen science effective at science? A quantitative assessment of the contributions of citizen science for its core purpose--scientific research--is lacking. We examined the contribution of citizen science to a review paper by ornithologists in which they formulated ten central claims about the impact of climate change on avian migration.