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.

ProcessProcess section of Guidance

The Seabird Monitoring Programme

Once data have been collected into the standard recording forms for either colony counts or breeding success, they are inputted to the SMP Online Portal where they undergo further checks and standardisation prior to onward sharing.

Click the icons below to find out more about the verification, quality control and standardisation processes.

Find out more...

Verification

As data are added to the SMP, they are automatically flagged as needing checking by the BTO team. There are thousands of volunteers, so they rely on coding solutions to flag outliers, checking the incoming data against set thresholds for each species. Flagged data are then checked manually by the team at the BTO.

Standardisation

Once the data have been verified and added to the SMP Online Portal, they are already in a standard format thanks to the portal submission process. An additional standardisation step is carried by the BTO team to ensure the data are standardised to the data standards required by the NBN (Darwin Core Archive(DwC-A) prior to sharing the data with them.

[The Seabird Monitoring Programme process image] — British Trust for Ornithology

Next (Preserve) Process section of Guidance Back Home