Citizen surveillance for environmental monitoring: combining the efforts of citizen science and crowdsourcing in a quantitative data framework

SpringerPlus

Table 1 Evaluation of some typical characteristics of citizen surveillance data

	Type of citizen science
	Structured	Unstructured	Crowdsourcing
Control over observation process	\({+}{+}\)	\({-}\)	\({-}{-}\)
Data quantity	\({-}/{+}\)	\({-}/{+}\)	\({+}\)
Signal-to-noise ratio	\({+}{+}\)	\({-}/{+}\)	\({-}{-}\)
Temporal coverage	\({-}/{+}\)	\({+}\)	\({+}\)
Spatial coverage	\({-}/{+}\)	\({+}\)	\({+}\)

Choosing a type of citizen surveillance will typically be a trade-off between data quality and data quantity
Symbol legend: \({+}{+}\) Good; \({+}\) Moderate; \({-}/{+}\) Variable; \({-}\) Low; \({-}{-}\) Bad