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- Title
How Reliable are Citizen-Derived Scientific Data? Assessing the Quality of Contrail Observations Made by the General Public.
- Authors
Fowler, Amy; Whyatt, J. Duncan; Davies, Gemma; Ellis, Rebecca
- Abstract
Citizen science projects encourage the general public to participate in scientific research. Participants can contribute large volumes of data over broad spatial and temporal frames; however, the challenge is to generate data of sufficient quality to be useable in scientific research. Most observations made by citizen-scientists can be independently verified by 'experts'. However, verification is more problematic when the phenomena being recorded are short-lived. This article uses a GIS methodology to verify the quality of contrail observations made by the general public as part of the OPAL Climate Survey. We verify observations using datasets derived from a variety of different sources (experts, models and amateur enthusiasts) with different spatial and temporal properties which reflect the complex 3D nature of the atmosphere. Our results suggest that ∼70% of citizen observations are plausible, based on favorable atmospheric conditions and the presence or absence of aircraft; a finding which is in keeping with other, more conventional citizen science projects. However, questions remain as to why the quality of the citizen-based observations was so high. Given the lack of supporting data on observers, it is impossible to determine whether the dataset was generated by the activities of many participants or a small but dedicated number of individual observers.
- Subjects
SCIENCE databases; CONDENSATION trails; CITIZEN science; GEOGRAPHY projects; GEOGRAPHIC information systems; ATMOSPHERE; SCIENTIFIC community; SCIENTISTS
- Publication
Transactions in GIS, 2013, Vol 17, Issue 4, p488
- ISSN
1361-1682
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/tgis.12034