Citizen science is well-known as being a very efficient means collecting large amounts of data at a global scale. However, even if it seems nice to collect observations about flowering plants and singing birds, people living in today’s world need to understand this global biodiversity crisis is here to stay. We need to move past the human sensor paradigm and learn to incorporate the general public in the entire research process. We need to move from cheap data labour to truly empowered citizen scientists and realise that stakeholders may not have complex scientific questions but still have questions about their environment. We need to move from citizen science to participatory science (Hinckson et al. 2017,Katapally 2019,Poncet and Turcati 2017), if we want to tackle the challenges we will be facing in the coming years.

Natural Solutions has developed a number of gamified citizen science applications in the past (ecoBalade, Biolit, Sauvage de ma rue, INPN espèces, GeoNature Citizen), through which we have gained a good understanding of what works. Our last project is to create a citizen acting mobile platform using cognitive bias to nudge citizen in acting toward biodiversity. The application will be part of the IUCN congress taking part in Marseille in 2020.

citizen science, participatory science, public participation, participatory action research, cognitive science, nudges

Olivier Rovellotti