The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
This week it’s the Association for Advancing Participatory Science conference (27-30 May 2025). The opening keynote was given by iNaturalist Scott Loarie, the executive director of iNaturalist. Scott covered 5 lessons from iNat. It started as an MSc project, and has been going in for 17 years. It’s growing over time, about 8m observation. Seasonality … Continue reading CAPS25 conference – iNatuarlist keynote
Continue reading »The final keynote of the ECSA 2024 conference was given by Katja Mayer on “Participatory Turns: The Bumpy Roads to Recognition of Participatory Approaches in Social Sciences and Lessons for Citizen Science.” The starting point is the need to consider the increase “participation” across disciplines and what participation means. She covers the participatory turns. In … Continue reading Notes from ECSA 2024 – Katja Mayer’s keynote on participatory turns in the social sciences and lesson to citizen science
Continue reading »Last year, I’ve contributed to the Toposophy podcast, which is called “Common Ground”. It covers a wide range of topics in urbanism and urban planning, from culture to technology. The episode that I spoke on is dedicated to direct democracy and citizen science, exploring the links between deep engagement forms of citizens in the management … Continue reading Toposophy’s “common ground” podcast episode on citizen science
Continue reading »At the end of May, the Citizen Science Association (CSA) celebrated its 10th year anniversary in its conference – C*Sci 2023, held at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona. The conference (22-26 May) provided the opportunity to meet face-to-face colleagues in the area of citizen science, which I haven’t had a chance to talk … Continue reading C*Sci 2023 and the new name of the (US) Citizen Science Association
Continue reading »At the end of September 2021, I received an email from Nature Reviews Methods Primers (NRMP) with an invitation to lead a paper on citizen science. NRMP is a journal that commissions methodological papers on different topics, so they can be used by early career and experienced researchers, to learn about a new methodology and … Continue reading Nature Reviews Methods Primers paper on citizen science
Continue reading »Today is the first day after the end of the European Research Council (ERC) funded “Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and visualisation”. For me, it’s an important milestone. In July 2007, Jerome Lewis got in touch with me about the need to develop data collection and visualisation to protect and nurture forest communities. This effort evolved … Continue reading Extreme Citizen Science Analysis and Visualisation – final event
Continue reading »At the end of 2019, just before the pandemic, I was lucky to be hosted and supported by the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris (CRI-Paris.org) and with colleagues from ECSA and the European project EU-Citizen.Science carried out a survey to help identify what are the boundaries of citizen science, in terms of the … Continue reading Contours of Citizen Science paper published in Royal Society Open Science →
Continue reading »At the end of 2019, just before the pandemic, I was lucky to be hosted and supported by the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris (CRI-Paris.org) and with colleagues from ECSA and the European project EU-Citizen.Science carried out a survey to help identify what are the boundaries of citizen science, in terms of the … Continue reading Contours of Citizen Science paper published in Royal Society Open Science
Continue reading »Building upon our work on volunteered geographical information (VGI) and ambient geographic information (AGI) and how such data (e.g. social media) can be used to understand place, Xiaoyi Yuan, Andreas Züfle and myself have a new paper entitled: “A Th…
Continue reading »Building upon our work on volunteered geographical information (VGI) and ambient geographic information (AGI) and how such data (e.g. social media) can be used to understand place, Xiaoyi Yuan, Andreas Züfle and myself have a new paper entitled: “A Th…
Continue reading »In the past we have written extensively on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) such as OpenStreetMap or Twitter. However, we have not really explored Street View Imagery (SVI), well not until now. Within the realm of VGI, SVI has emerged in …
Continue reading »In the past we have written extensively on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) such as OpenStreetMap or Twitter. However, we have not really explored Street View Imagery (SVI), well not until now. Within the realm of VGI, SVI has emerged in …
Continue reading »As part of the EU-Citizen.Science project, UCL is leading on the training work package. This means that we coordinate the part of the platform that will help to store and share training material for citizen science projects, and generally for the field (such as the UCL online course). The stay at the Centre for Research … Continue reading What can we learn from analysing citizen science training materials?
Continue reading »This is an invitation to complete a survey that is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7XN5MQG This survey will present you stories about different forms of public participation in research. Different activities within this area of public participation in research are now called “citizen science” and we would like to hear what your opinion is about each activity. … Continue reading Would you call this a citizen science activity?
Continue reading »A CRI-Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle workshop: created by Anshu (CRI long term fellow) and Simon (MNHN), from a meeting at the Galaxy community in Freiburg. I joined the design process and it was structured so the museum and the CRI present the systems that are being developed, with a scope for a discussion about lessons … Continue reading Platforms for citizen science
Continue reading »Back in October 2018, I reported on the workshop at the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis (IIASA) about non-traditional data approaches and the Sustainable Development Goals. The outcome of this workshop has now been published in Nature Sustainability. The writing process was coordinated by Dr Linda See of IIASA, and with a distributed process that included … Continue reading Published: Citizen science and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Continue reading »The final output from the Urban Zoo project is out (see the post about the previous paper, which was published in GEO). This one is a literature and analysis of the role of urbanisation in zoonosis. The paper is open access, so you can read it here. It was led by Dr Sohel Ahmed (and … Continue reading New paper: Does urbanization make emergence of zoonosis more likely? Evidence, myths and gaps
Continue reading »The Geographical magazine, which is the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, run an article about “the future of mapping“. The piece was written by Katie Burton, and it covers a range of recent developments in mapping technologies. I was interviewed for the piece, and provided information about our work with Sapelli, and also comments … Continue reading Geographical magazine: The Future of Mapping
Continue reading »I find it enjoyable when different strands of research come together. In many ways, research on the impacts of natural hazards on society – or Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), citizen science, and volunteer geographic information (VGI) are parallel research areas with research communities that work on each of them, and only occasionally come together. The … Continue reading New paper: Global mapping of citizen science projects for disaster risk reduction
Continue reading »A new paper, led by Artemis Skarlatidou, was just published in the journal “Citizen Science: Theory and Practice”, describing how stakeholder mapping can be used in co-created citizen science projects. The workshop was part of the COST Action on citizen science, and the NERC Engaging Environment project “Into the night” was one of the case … Continue reading New paper: The Value of Stakeholder Mapping to Enhance Co-Creation in Citizen Science Initiatives
Continue reading »The Urban Zoo project focused on the issues of transfer of disease from animals to humans, in particular in the context of Nairobi, Kenya. This is mostly a medical study, but through the involvement of UCL Development Planning Unit (DPU), issues of urban planning and urban studies were integrated. The new paper “Participatory mapping and food‐centred … Continue reading New paper: Participatory mapping and food‐centred justice in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya
Continue reading »The Computational Foundry at the Swansea University organised two days “Festival of Ideas” as part of the activities to celebrate its opening. The first day was organised by Ben Shneiderman and focused on aspects of AI, while the second day, curated by Jenny Preece, focused on citizen science. The summary here is from the second day, … Continue reading Citizen Science @ Computation Foundry, Swansea
Continue reading »Following the publication of a paper in Nature Communications on the use of eBird data for conservation planning, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) dedicated a segment of their “The Current” programme to the role of citizen science. The section explored “How citizen science is changing the research landscape? Online communities and new technology are making it easier … Continue reading CBC – The Current – How citizen science is changing the research landscape?
Continue reading »This is a reblogging of the reporting from DITOs final event, which was blogged by Alice Sheppard (which I’ve edited, lightly): Introduction to the day Camille Pisani, the Director of RBINS praises numerous volunteers and collaborators who have worked together, and the way different activities have been aimed at reaching many different audiences. There have … Continue reading Doing It Together Science (DITOs) final event talks (part 1)
Continue reading »The first day of the conference started with Angel Hjarding, the conference chair opened the conference, with over 800 participants. The conference was strongly supported by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Welcomes addresses came from the North Carolina Secretary of Natural and Cultural Resources, Susi Hamilton who highlighted the state support to the natural … Continue reading Citizen Science 2019: opening talk “The Power (Relations) of Citizen Science.”
Continue reading »As part of the COST action that is dedicated to citizen science across Europe, I have participated in a training school about digital transformation, citizen science, and social innovation. The training school set out to be a five-day event for doctoral students, researchers, policymakers, civic entrepreneurs, designers, and civil servants who are interested in exploring and … Continue reading Vespucci / COST action training school on digital transformation, citizen science, and social innovation
Continue reading »Urban and slum areas in Nairobi (False composite image created by stacking image bands 7, 6 and 4 from the Landsat 8 satellite.Turning back to slums, we just published paper entitled “Detecting and Mapping Slums using Open Data: A Case Study in Kenya”…
Continue reading »Urban and slum areas in Nairobi (False composite image created by stacking image bands 7, 6 and 4 from the Landsat 8 satellite.Turning back to slums, we just published paper entitled “Detecting and Mapping Slums using Open Data: A Case Study in Kenya”…
Continue reading »November 24 marks 10 years since Louise Francs, Chris Church and myself set up Mapping for Change. It’s a proud moment when the social enterprise that was set out of a research project at UCL is now well established, and the work that it does is mentioned in the annual report of the Chief Medical … Continue reading 10 years of Mapping for Change
Continue reading »One of the joys of the Doing it Together Science project is that it provides opportunities to work closely with different partners from very different areas. One such a collaboration is with Bruno Strasser and his group at the University of Geneva who are researching citizen science from an STS/history of science perspective. Over the … Continue reading Citizen Science: Expertise, Democracy and Public Participation – Report for Swiss Science Council
Continue reading »I’ve mentioned in the previous posts about the introduction and conclusions chapters in the book “Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy” and the chapter about citizen science in universities. The final chapter in the book that I would like to highlight is my chapter “participatory citizen science“. As Rick Bonney pointed to me, on the face … Continue reading New publication: Participatory citizen science
Continue reading »As part of the editorial team of the book “Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Policy, Science and Society“, I have contributed by working with the authors of chapters, organising the orders of the chapters, managing the peer review process, and so on. In addition, I was involved in the writing to 4 chapters out of … Continue reading New publication: Innovation in open science, society and policy – setting the agenda for citizen science
Continue reading »At the beginning of the year, as part of my work at UCL and together with members of the Extreme Citizen Science group, I launched a new postgraduate level course “Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing“. We have opened it for distance learners on the UCL eXtend platform. As a postgraduate course, it required … Continue reading Five online training modules on citizen science
Continue reading »About a week ago, the journal Nature published a feature article about Citizen Science No “PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research“, with the subtitle: “Projects that recruit the public are getting more ambitious and diverse, but the field faces some growing pains.” The report was written by the science journalist Aisling Irwin who contacted me, among … Continue reading Nature article on citizen science: mixing typologies
Continue reading »During the 22 to 29 October, I visited Shanghai & Shenzhen together with Michael Norton (CIVA), who organised the visit, and Liz Barry (Public Lab). This was a packed tour, with two all-day workshops that are dedicated to citizen science (one in Fudan University, Shanghai, and the other as part of the Asian Environmental Innovation … Continue reading Social Innovation and Citizen Science in Shanghai & Shenzhen
Continue reading »Readers of the blog might know we have an interest in volunteered geographic information, social media and Web 2.0 technologies and how they can be used to explore urban systems. Recently however, we turned our focus on how such information and technol…
Continue reading »Readers of the blog might know we have an interest in volunteered geographic information, social media and Web 2.0 technologies and how they can be used to explore urban systems. Recently however, we turned our focus on how such information and technol…
Continue reading »About a year ago, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, hosted the PPGIS 2017 workshop (here are my notes from the first day and the second day). Today, four papers from the workshop were published in the journal Quaestiones Geographicae which was established in 1974 as an annual journal of the Faculty of Geographical and Geological … Continue reading Papers from PPGIS 2017 meeting: state of the art and examples from Poland and the Czech Republic
Continue reading »It’s now about two months since the intensive 10 days at the beginning of June, which included attending the workshop Science and Dissent, the ECSA conference, the follow-up COST Action on citizen science meeting, and the Ecsite conference. Shortly after, I attended the UNECE 22nd Working Group of Parties to the Aarhus Convention. June ended … Continue reading Communities of practice of citizen science – workshops, meetings, and conferences
Continue reading »The first outcome of the December 2016 workshop on apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects was the open access paper “Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science“, which came out in October 2017. The workshop, which was organised by Soledad Luna and Ulrike Sturm from the Berlin Museum for Natural History, has … Continue reading Developing mobile applications for environmental and biodiversity citizen science: considerations and recommendations
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