Citizen Science Case Studies

The case studies below demonstrate the data journey for specific marine citizen science projects, covering their planning, collection, processing, preservation, sharing and reuse.

Re-useRe-use section of Guidance

The Rock Pool Project

Thanks to the various data sharing mechanisms described in the previous Share section, data are available to be reused from various locations including The Rock Pool Project website, NBN Atlas, DASSH and OBIS, once they are fully verified and processed.

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Known uses

Currently data are used in terms of reporting to participants and to the media to show what has been discovered. Wider re-use has not yet been recorded and is something that is difficult to track unless the data are cited or they inform The Rock Pool Project that the data have been used.

Every month an email is sent to Natural England with direct links to data for non-native species. This helps to update England’s non-native species list and to receive quick alerts of new invasive non-native species. The Rock Pool are hoping to expand that to other organisations soon, including reporting results to the South West Marine Ecosystems group (SWME) and similar networks.

Licenses

The data that are shared are not owned by The Rock Pool Project, but by the data collector, as specified in iNaturalist. As a result, the data collector can determine the license under which the data and images are shared and are encouraged to use CC-BY or CC0 licensing, which allow the data to be reused openly. Find out more about data licenses here: https://www.dassh.ac.uk/citizen-science/best-practice#bp-re-use

Re-use of other data

The Rock Pool Project have used other data from NBN as part of this project, to see what the current situation was for species being reported as non-native species during the bioblitz events. Reusing data is not always easy and can require more technical skills, for example to use the NBN API, as using the NBN Atlas downloads would have been a much more time-consuming way to access the data.

[The Rock Pool Project sharing image] — The Rock Pool Project

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