Internship

Proposal for internship WUR Citizen Science Portal

Citizen Science represents one way to connect science and society meaningfully around common matters of interest and concern. On the one hand, it provides an opportunity to restore public trust in science by helping citizens understand better how science and by supporting them in their own pursuit of a more sustainable way of living. On the other hand, science can benefit from citizens’ close proximity to the issues and from the capacities citizens have to contribute to research.

All Wageningen UR science groups are involved in some form of citizen science (CS) project A known example of is Wageningen UR’s Nature Calendar where citizens collect and share information about the presence of certain plant and bird species during certain times of the year). See, for instance this article.

At the moment there is no clear overview of who within Wageningen UR is engaged in some form of CS. There is a need to create and overview and an entry point for both citizens and researchers. Wageningen University and Research has the ambition to create a WUR Citizen Science Portal where people can be connected to certain scientists/research groups within Wageningen UR who have experience in one or more of these ways of working with citizens and policy-makers.

Education and Learning Science, ideally in combination with another Chair Group that has some affinity with citizen science, is offering an internship to one or two students who are interested in exploring the concept of citizen science, its institutionalization in higher education and in the design of an interface/portal that can link citizens to researchers. The internship would entail identifying and describing WUR citizen science activities and generating ideas for the design of an online Citizen Science portal. The length and study load of the Internship can be discussed. Ideally, the internship would start in 2020 still or otherwise in January of 2021.