„Record, understand and act “– How citizen-operated biodiversity science can lead to sustainable decisions in policy making and society

Biodiversity research needs support from citizen scientists. Besides education and the chance of self-efficacy by comprehension and empowerment through active participation citizen scientists support gathering big data pools that will lead to reliable and convincing policy recommendations. Citizen scientists are already involved in different iDiv projects like CoolSpots, FLOW, VielFalterGarten or InsektenMobil.

The focus of the projects and the way to collaborate with citizens is different, but successful citizen scientist projects follow the same steps: They design the research programme – often in codesign with citizen, NGOs or agencies, develop training programs and resources for participants, they engage in data collection, analysis and interpretation, publications and visualization and feedback of results to public and policy. The importance of these steps needs to be considered when designing citizen science projects. We will also exchange about issues of data quality and analysis options. We will also introduce developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning for image analysis in citizen science.

The aim of this workshop is to exchange ideas and experiences and to see how future activities could be planned. Importantly – next to data collection – we are interested how citizen science can serve as intervention for indepth experience, learning and understanding about biodiversity and thereby fostering biodiversity conservation stewardship.

This workshop shall be the first step to connect the different iDiv projects and develop a new iDiv taproot in the field of biodiversity research and citizen science. The output of this workshop will also contribute to the development of the Citizen Science Strategy 2030 for Germany.