**3.2 What is citizen science**

Citizen science relates to the active participation of the public in scientific research projects. This is a rapidly expanding field in open innovation. CS provides an integrated model of co-creation leading to public knowledge production with science. CS provides a valuable tool for citizens to play a more active role in sustainable development, and it can benefit the scientific community in the gathering of data that would otherwise be difficult and costly to obtain. Because any citizen can go out to collect data, sample sizes are therefore potentially very large [55]. This means that we can improve environmental event detection having more people collecting good quality data. Data gathered can inform on accelerated human impact on ecosystems, where increased and on-going monitoring is required to understand and potentially remedy environmental functions and discussed by Loisell *et. al.,* [56].
