The UKEOF Citizen Science Working Group has released a new report, 'Social media as a source of data for environmental science & monitoring'. The report follows a symposium organised by the group in 2020. The report's authors explore how social media can support environmental monitoring and research, and how its potential can be realised. They consider why social media is valuable e.g. a huge amount of ‘real time’ data, opportunities for increased engagement and gaining information on people’s interactions with their environment. They also look at the challenges, including the technicalities (and ethics) of collating and re-using data from social media sites and issues of data quality and bias.
The report features six Case Studies from the symposium that show how social media has been used for environmental monitoring.
The only guarantee with social media platforms is that change is inevitable, but we hope that this report will inspire and facilitate further discussion and collaboration on the good use of social media for environmental monitoring and research.
Report details
P. Bell, M.J.O. Pocock, R. Grew, T. August, E. Bee, J. Chamberlain, N. Fox, C. Pennington, V. Sbragaglia, E. Starkey, K. Hyder (2024). Social media as a source of data for environmental science & monitoring. UK Environmental Observation Framework, Lancaster, UK. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13969953. [Link is to the Zenodo repository]