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The natural world in your pocket: How citizen science is democratising discovery

“It’s a global revolution in biology around the world,” says Jon Sullivan, a senior lecturer in ecology at Lincoln University and one of the team who operates the Aotearoa “node” of iNaturalist, a global platform. The data from my observations as well as thousands of others can be used by scientists here, be fed into international biodiversity databases, and – if the discovery is, say, a new weed – reported to the Ministry for Primary Industries.

iNaturalist is just one of many citizen science projects that use the internet – others spot seals from space, find galaxies in the dark beyond or note kererū numbers across Aotearoa. These online projects, often enabled by omnipresent technology, widen the definition of science and open it up to more people.