Citizens create knowledge
Citizen science is very popular in Germany.
They count butterflies, document the first months of their baby’s lives or archive historical family photographs. More and more people are making information of this kind available to research institutes and universities. Citizen science, as it is known, is a new trend that brings amateur and professional researchers together. Laypeople collect data and researchers analyse it. Often, however, the people concerned are experts themselves. In the North Sea, for example, shrimpers record which fish species they find in their nets as by-catch. They then send the data to the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven where marine researchers are studying how fish stocks are changing in the North Sea.
Findings from previous research projects are now being brought together and developed at the national level. In July the Federal Ministry of Education and Research provided two years of funding for the GEWISS project (Citizens create knowledge – knowledge creates citizens), which is being coordinated by Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig. Within the project professional and amateur researchers aim to find ways of securing the quality of data collected by laypeople as well as means of publishing and applying the results of citizen science.
Interest in citizen science is considerable. According to a survey by the organisation Science in Dialogue (WiD), just under one in three people in Germany would be interested in taking part in a research project. A German researcher is also promoting this idea in Europe: Johannes Vogel, General Director of the Museum für Naturkunde, is Chair of the European Citizen Science Association (ESCA), which was founded at the beginning of 2014.
First Citizen Science Dialogue Forum on 17 and 18 September in Leipzig
www.citizen-science-germany.de
http://ecsa.biodiv.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de
