Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a way to farm out tasks that are easy for humans to complete but too challenging for computers.

On 29-30 August, I attended the State of the Map (SotM) conference, in particular the scientific part. It's been 15 years since the last time that I attended the SotM conference (last time 2011!), and it's an opportunity to fill in a knowledge gap that I developed over this period. Unlike other conference reports that I've written, I am not summarising sessions, but capturing my impressions and aspects that I note through the renewed engagement with OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Free online map poster and wallpaper generator. Design custom, print-ready map art for any city or location — export as PNG, PDF, or SVG. No sign-up required.

As biodiversity loss accelerates and the need for environmental monitoring grows, citizen science is becoming increasingly important. This raises questions a...

Join us for the launch of CS Co-labs to hear what is on offer, meet the team and network with others using or interested in citizen science methods.

The map of participants in the PReCISE, one of the projects that was funded between 2024-2026 Ten years ago, in May 2016, I wrote a blog post about the experience of securing funding. It looked at 21 funding applications that I was involved in between the middle of 2014 and early 2016 (about 2 years). In the post, I was looking at the experience of leading a growing research group which has reached about 20 people at its peak.

Camera traps generate large volumes of wildlife footage, but identifying animals to the individual level remains challenging and time-consuming. Using European pine martens in the Forest of Dean as a....

The summer university "Sentir, penser, agir dans la polyphonie du vivant" (Feeling, thinking and acting within the polyphony of life) ran between 12 and 18 July 2026 at the Moulin des Baronnies, Sarlabous (In the Pyrenees). It was organised by a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team, which included the regional authority of the Lannemezan Plateau; The research cluster (GIS TEPCARE…

What can plastic fragments found in an animal’s digestive tract tell us about the waters it has traversed?

The Royal Society has published the Science for society report exploring the multiple connections between science and the public, and proposes recommendations for how these connections might be streng...

I very much like the work of Gwen Ottinger, who is a professor at Drexel University. Gwen is a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) researcher, and among a group of researchers in STS who are researching community-led science, such as the Bucket Brigade. Her work is particularly important in the context of environmental justice (EJ), because the sites that she's been focusing on are refineries and petrochemical factories, and their neighbouring communities (fenceline communities).

The online course Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing was launched in January 2018, about 8.5 years ago(!). It was set as a hybrid course - for the students at UCL, it was set as an MSc level module, with all the material shared openly for anyone to use and learn. So far, the system has recorded over 2000 students who took it since January 2019.

Welcome to the hub! If you are a citizen science researcher or practitioner in the UK, or interested in learning more about citizen science, then you are in the right place. This resource hub aims to ...

The Portuguese Citizen Science Network is carrying out regular interviews about citizen science as part of their monhtly newsletter. At you can find interviews with, Maria Fernanda Rollo, Karen Soacha, Alan Irwing, an Carolina Doran. The interviews are published in Portuguese and English. I was invited to contribute to this series, and answered four questions that were posed to me: …

Academic life involves a lot of travel. Now that I'm based part of the time in Paris, journeys to Brussels are easy - only an hour and a half by train. In the last two weeks, I found myself visiting Brussels three times: first, for the PATTERN project final event on 14-15 April, where the results of the project were shared.

The ATRAP project in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda provides insights to the factors that shape citizen science practice in low- and medium-income countries (LMIC).

The European Citizen Science Association 2026 conference is the sixth conference. The first conference was in 2016 in Berlin (see posts here), continued in 2018 in Geneva (see posts here), was supposed to be in Trieste for 2020, but then ended up pivoting online due to Covid-19, the 2022 edition was in Berlin again, with 2024 in Vienna (