The study, the first of its kind to quantitatively explore the
The researchers only found 20 ecological and environmental projects that had begun before 1970, but this had increased to more than 500 over 40 years later in 2014, with a consistent 10 percent increase in the number of projects every year during the 1990s and 2000s.
They showed that the diversity of projects that are available for people to participate in has increased over time, and that this seems to be driven in large part by advances in new technology.
Since 2010 more and more citizen science is taking place as part of 'mass participation' projects conducted using smartphones, whereas the projects that started back in the 1990s tended to involve structured monitoring - recording animals, plants or water quality at the same places time after time. These structured projects are still a major part of the citizen science landscape but new approaches making use of new technologies have added to the diversity.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-global-growth-ecological-environmental-citizen.html#jCp
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