The reliability of Citizen-science data collection - analysis of Natur i Endring project

Abstract

In this study we evaluate Natur i Endring citizen science project after the first season of running (2018). Natur i Endring is a project focused on crowd-sourcing data collection of naturally occurring treeline and forest line in Norway. We use Kirkpatrick taxonomy model of evaluation to assess the project from these four perspectives: (1) Reaction evaluation of the ways public was engaged and how effective was the outreach strategy. (2) Learning evaluation of feedback analysis after certain time the project was running. Main goal is to identify if participants learned something new and what is the overall sentiment about the project. (3) Behavior evaluation of users engagement patterns and activity in the field. (4) Results evaluation of actual data provided by citizen scientists and assessment of data quality.