This term is often misused.


I conducted one of the largest and earliest citizen science studies with participation from beekeepers in a landscape level assessment of air pollutants in bees and their colonies over an area from Yelm to Whidbey Island, Washington.


That study ended up passing a Good Laboratory Practices Audit by EPA's Corvallis Ecological Research Laboratory, the results were published in the peer-reviewed journal, Science, Feb 5, 1985 "Pollution Monitoring of Puget Sound with Honey Bee", Bromenshenk et al.


This was a seminal article leading to uses of bees as sentinel organisms, to pesticide and bee studies on landscape levels in Italy, and various other studies.  It also lead to our work for the US DOE on their National Laboratories, US Army in Aberdeen, and US DARPA for our bees and landmines work.


We also published an article on "Public Participation in Environmental Monitoring: A Means of Attaining Network Capability".  This appeared in the journal of Environmental Monitoring and Assessment.  Authors Jerry J. Bromenshenk and Eric M. Preston, Jan, 1986.




The term Citizen Science came into being in the 1990s.  Thus, I was ahead of the curve twice in my career.  I was studying air pollution problems in the 1970s with Dr Clancy Gordon, including a type of vegetation damage later named "acid rain".    That's what we were studying, but we didn't call it that.   Then, I was one of the early pioneers of public research, but I didn't know it was going to be called "Citizen Science".





Once the term Citizen Science became commonly used, the Oxford dictionary defined "Citizen Science"    The primary Oxford definition describes what I mean when I use the term: "citizen science n. scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions."


Properly done, Citizen Science takes work, requires a good experimental design, a Materials and Methods protocol, training, and guidance - we described many of the pros and cons with respect to citizen science, aka public participation, and honey bees in our 1986 peer-reviewed paper.


Unfortunately, there are many times when someone dabbling without experience or guidance proclaims themselves to be a citizen scientist, much like Randy Oliver's definition of a honey bee expert - anyone who reached their second year of beekeeping, which I modify to "trying" to keep bees.  And a Treatment-Free person refusing to feed starving packages because it's not natural is not a 'Citizen Scientist' regardless of whether they think that they are doing research.  I think it's this latter type of self-proclaimed scientist that is causing the controversy.  Stick to the original concept and definition, and Citizen Scientist is a useful term - although I may revert to my original name - Public Participation in ....."


Amateur Scientist is not a synonym for Citizen Scientist.  Our studies for example had participants ranging from an actual hermit in the woods to Boeing Engineers and University/College Faculty.  Until recently, I was not in favor of Randy's - Let's do Citizen Science.  The only reason our Puget Sound studies met GLP audit standards and was published in Science, a premier Science journal, was because I spent a lot of time traveling from MT to the Seattle area to train, organize, guide, problem solve, etc.  Unmoderated Citizen Science versus Moderated by Professional Scientists and Institutions is similar to the difference between Bee Source and Bee-L.



























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