PARTICIPATORY SENSING AND CITIZEN SCIENCE

The increased access to personal computers, digital cameras, pervasive and mobile connectivity, and the online data resources of governmental organizations has set the stage to support an increased public engagement in science. Indeed, this has been evident in the recent increased participation in a multitude of citizen science projects and the plans of large-scale ecological observation networks such as NSF’s NEON to incorporate citizen scientist contributions. Mobile phone based tools, in particular, offer the ability to take citizen science field campaigns to an even higher level by allowing the easy collection of accurately geospatially-“tagged” data in the field. We provide an overview of two CENS citizen science-based projects that involve the use of mobile phones for field-based data collection of plant information: What's Invasive!, a weed-locating application, and Mobile BudBurst, a collaboration between CENS and UCAR's Project BudBurst.