Assessing backyard biodiversity across broad spatial scales: The School of Ants citizen science project

Citizen science (aka Public Participation in Scientific Research) aims to simultaneously achieve the goals of science researchers and science educators. At best, citizen science projects engage non-scientists in the scientific process, both increasing public scientific literacy and generating scientific data, often on scales larger than a researcher could achieve alone. While the benefits of this approach are clear, recent reviews of citizen science projects have identified challenges to achieving citizen science’s goals. This study describes how the School of Ants citizen science project has addressed three main difficulties: organizational challenges, data collection issues and data management problems. Specifically, we outline how the School of Ants has met both educational and scientific goals without limiting participation or compromising data quality.