Citizen science and crowdsourcing enable the public to make meaningful contributions to scientific and engineering research and monitoring. These approaches also produce accurate data to inform a wide range of management and public policy issues, encourage civic partnerships with government at all levels, and impact governance through:

• local scale activities, as demonstrated through drinking water quality monitoring;
• national or supranational scale activities, as revealed in the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s National Broadband Map; and
• local-to global scale activities, including the inclusion of participatory monitoring and management in international biodiversity assessments.

This special issue of Citizen Science: Theory and Practice explores the ways in which these approaches may inform management and public policy. It also examines the legal, policy, and institutional challenges to conducting citizen science and crowdsourcing and highlights strategies for improving bureaucratic processes to increase the impact of citizen science and crowdsourcing on public sector policies and practices.

Guest Editors

Lea A. Shanley, Alison Parker, Sven Schade, and Aletta Bonn