Citizen Science is defined as the participation of non-professional volunteers in scientific projects (Dickson et al, 2010) and has experienced rapid growth over the past decade. The projects that are emerging in this area range from contributory projects, co-created projects, collegiate projects, which are initiated and run by a group of people with shared interest, without any involvement of professional scientists.
In many citizen science projects, GIS&T is enabling the collection, analysis, and visualisation of spatial data to affect decision-making. Some examples may include:
Such projects have the opportunity to empower or disempower members of the public, depending upon access to and understanding of technology. Citizen Science projects using GIS&T may help communities influence decision makers and support the gathering of large-scale scientific evidence on a range of issues. This may also renew people’s interests in the sciences and foster continued and lifelong learning.
This entry describes the conferences and publications that facilitate the creation and transfer of geospatial knowledge in the academy and practice communities. The large number and variety of industry-led and topical conferences and workshops that serve and connect with specific audiences are described first. The attention then shifts to the geospatial publications starting with the top 50 academic journals that span geography, spatial sciences, and computer science domains. Their titles, starting dates, impact scores from 2023, publishers, and URLs are captured in a table and the largest of the three abovementioned groups of journals focused on the spatial sciences, are assigned to one of the geodesy and positioning, remote sensing, geographic information science, and cartography subdomains. The attention then shifts to some of the seminal books published in the past 2-3 decades and the roles of conference proceedings, magazines and newsletters, and web posts and blogs and the likelihood that nearly all these materials can be acquired and used in digital form nowadays.