The article describes the role of citizen scientists in collecting valuable data. The citizen scientists are usually volunteers who are passionate about fields like zoology or botany and want to contribute to the science knowledge. Several questions arise about citizen scientists. For one, how can we gauge the accuracy of the observations that citizen scientists gather? One way is to pair together trained staff with the citizen scientists to compare data and determine reliability. Also the roles of citizen scientists may be limited to, say, counting 5 or 10 easily identifiable plants. The development of specific protocols for citizen scientists may affect the overall accuracy of their data.

One thing I’ve noticed about citizen scientists is that they’ve thus far been predominantly utilized for such fields as zoology or population ecology, and almost not at all for biology, chemistry, or physics (the ‘harder’ sciences). I think this is due the fact that research in these fields requires extensive knowledge and equipment than a hobbyist possesses. Also, population ecology and the like benefit much more from having a large number of people gathering data, because populations sizes cannot be easily determined. I think if I were conducting an experiment, it would have to be quiet large in scope before I would consider recruiting citizen scientists for the job.