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Abstract
Citizen science websites are emerging as a common way for volunteers to collect and report geographic ecological data. Engaging the public in citizen science is challenging and, when involving online participation, data entry, and map use, becomes even more daunting. Given these new challenges, citizen science websites must be easy to use, result in positive overall satisfaction for many different users, support many different tasks, and ensure data quality. To begin reaching these goals, we built a geospatially enabled citizen science website, evaluated its usability, and gained experience by working with and listening to citizens using the website. We sought to determine general perceptions, discover potential problems, and iteratively improve website features. Although the website was rated positively overall, map-based tasks identified a wide range of problems. Given our results, we redesigned the website, improved the content, enhanced the ease of use, simplified the map interface, and added features. We discuss citizen science websites in relation to online Public Participation Geographic Information Systems, examine the role(s) websites may play in the citizen science research model, discuss how citizen science research advances GIScience, and offer guidelines to improve citizen-based web mapping applications.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation under grant OCI-0636213. Logistical support was provided by the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. We thank the following organizations and people for their help with this research: the graduate students and staff at the Center for Research on Communication and Technology Usability Laboratory of the Department of Journalism and Technical Communication, Mariah Coler, Sarah Braun, Cindy Hale, Erica Saunders, Brian Ewart, Laura McFarland, and all of our citizen science volunteer participants. We especially thank Mariah Coler for her willingness to provide constant website testing throughout our website development lifecycle. We thank Tom Stohlgren for providing edits to earlier drafts of this manuscript.