Work

Challenges of passive citizen science in ecology within a shifting social media landscape

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Effective conservation relies on comprehensive ecological data, including detailed species occurrences, to track distribution shifts, detect invasive species, and assess wildlife-human interactions. Despite recent technological advancements, environmental and biodiversity monitoring still faces financial and logistical limitations. Passive citizen science, which gathers data from social media platforms, provides a complementary approach that has proven effective in monitoring plants, insects, coral reefs, birds, recreational fishing, or marine pollution, among others. However, the rapid transformation of established social media platforms, the emergence of new distributed networks, and the rise of misinformation are reshaping the social media landscape and casting uncertainty on the future of this method. In this Viewpoint article, we review the current challenges of passive citizen science and call for strengthening this valuable approach for regional solutions that consider linguistic diversity, multiple data sources, fluctuating user engagement, and the integration of artificial intelligence tools for supervising and classifying images and text. At the policy level, a collaborative effort between platform providers and policymakers is essential to democratize research data access.

Source: Ecological Informatics

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2025.103278

Authors: Pablo Otero, Javier Menéndez-Blázquez, David March

Institutions: Instituto Español de Oceanografía, Centro Oceanográfico de Vigo, Universitat de València, University of Exeter

Language: English

Topic: Species Distribution and Climate Change

Subfield: Ecological Modeling

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Life on land

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,770