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In Citizen Science, experts from a variety of disciplines share their experiences of creating and implementing successful citizen science projects, primarily those that use massive data sets gathered by citizen scientists to better understand the impact of environmental change. This first and foundational book for this developing field of inquiry addresses basic aspects of how to conduct citizen science projects, including goal-setting, program design, and evaluation, as well as the nuances of creating a robust digital infrastructure and recruiting a large participant base through communications and marketing. An overview of the types of research approaches and techniques demonstrates how to make use of large data sets arising from citizen science projects. A final section focuses on citizen science's impacts and its broad connections to understanding the human dimensions and educational aspects of participation. Intended as a resource for a broad audience of experts and practitioners in natural sciences, information science, and social sciences, this book can be used to better understand how to improve existing programs, develop new ones, and make better use of the data resources that have accumulated from citizen science efforts. Its focus on harnessing the impact of "crowdsourcing" for scientific and educational endeavors is applicable to a wide range of fields, especially those that touch on the importance of massive collaboration aimed at understanding and conserving what we can of the natural world

Much research has demonstrated the power of social norms to affect proenvironmental behavior and conservation-related attitudes and beliefs in traditional "offline" social contexts. With the emergence of social media and citizen science platforms that allow for socially coordinated conservation efforts at scale comes a need to better understand the influence of social norms in online contexts. The present experiment explored effects of norm violations on impression formation and intergroup judgments within the context of Habitat Network, a socially networked mapping application where users create and share virtual representations (maps) of their properties. Results revealed that when participants viewed a map depicting the violation of a strongly held group norm—namely, the presence of an outdoor (vs. indoor) pet cat—they judged the map owner as significantly less likely to engage in a variety of proenvironmental behaviors. Importantly, this effect emerged despite evidence that the owner was already engaging in various sustainable practices. Moreover, the effect was mediated by the perceived quality of wildlife habitat represented by the map and moderated by participants' group membership status (as a cat owner) in a manner consistent with theories of impression formation and intergroup judgments. We discuss implications for social cognition and intergroup relations in proenvironmental online contexts.