What can citizen science do for us?

Members of the public have long participated in scientific discovery. The earliest records suggest that the practice dates back at least 2000 years to Ancient China, where people recorded outbreaks of the migratory locusts that wreaked havoc on their crops.

Today, such a data set would be recognised as citizen science, a term that wasn’t coined until the mid 1990s and is now defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions’.