Your neighbors are watching: How citizen science contributes to tracking climate change

Climate change occurs at all scales and spatially and temporally broad and dense data sets are needed to derive trends nation- and worldwide. Volunteer data can help produce more broad and dense data than professional scientists would be able to collect alone, filling this need without expending an overabundance of resources. Linking volunteer data collection with ground-based and remote sensing observations and the resulting indicators of climate change can also encourage awareness of specific climate change dynamics and impacts and increase participants’ climate literacy, as they see trends emerge in real-time as they collect their own data.