From Research Fortnight. One of my favourite photos shows a van
adrift in the middle of a Mongolian river. The unfortunate
occupants, who came to no harm, were volunteers recording
ultrasonic bat sounds for my research on bat populations. This
project, called iBats, began more than six years ago, when I
scaled-up traditional bat-monitoring methods so that anyone
could, with some hi-tech gadgetry, use them. At the time, most
volunteers on science projects needed a good initial knowledge
base, and so tended to be interested amateurs. Poor scientific
design had given some citizen science projects a bad name among
academics. Today, all that has changed. Thanks to the increasing
ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, the past 18 months have
seen an extraordinary growth in applications that take images,
sounds, and other recordings to feed into research projects.
Social media and gaming are rapidly changing who can take part
in science, and how they can participate. My Mongolian picture’s
most recent outing was a for