Citizen science is becoming a popular term referring to the contribution of volunteers to the scientific process. A successful meeting by the British Ecological Society, University of Glasgow and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was held in Glasgow this year to examine this developing movement. A useful broad definition of citizen science is the “volunteer collection of biodiversity and environmental data which contributes to expanding our knowledge of the natural environment, including biological monitoring and the collection or interpretation of environmental observations” (Roy et al., 2012). A cynical naturalist may say that we have being doing this for years. Yes, indeed, the history of natural history reminds us that our current knowledge of biology was often based on observations made by non professional scientists.
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