WHAT IS COMMUNITY SCIENCE?
Community science describes science done by and for communities. As we confront a future of unprecedented environmental chaos, making everyone—no matter their level of formal training or knowledge—a part of protecting global biodiversity is crucial to our collective survival. In community science, each project, what kinds of questions it asks, how the questions are answered, and what the information is used for, is driven by communities in the area. Scientists work in collaboration with communities to share techniques and strategize how different kinds of expertise, formal and informal, can come together to create richer and more useful pictures of the world.
As a result, each community science project looks very different because they depend on what communities want and need, and how they choose to work towards their goals. This diversity puts community science and community scientists at the cutting edge of research today, pushing our relationship with our environments further forward—and with that relationship, also our ability to protect those environments.
A Note on Terminology
Traditionally, community science has also been known as citizen science. The terms community science and citizen science remain under debate across the world, and federal agencies in the United States officially endorse the phrase citizen science as opposed to community science. To us, community science describes a vision of the same idea as citizen scientist that’s more inclusive for everyone involved—whether a citizen of a country or not and whether a formally-trained scientist or not.