Visualization and Perception of Data Gaps in the Context of Citizen Science Projects

Citizen Science initiatives often collect the data in an unsystematic way and dependent on the voluntary participation of interested citizens. The visualization of such data must present this incompleteness in a way that is understandable and comprehensible even to scientific laypersons if the correct conclusions are to be drawn. Using the project “Experiencing Biodiversity” as an example, this article shows how these requirements can be taken into account in the development of an online portal. Thereby, we discuss how data gaps can be pointed out by means of maps in order to be able to better interpret the significance of crowd-based data. We use empirical user studies to show the extent to which this was successful in the “Experiencing Biodiversity” project and the role of additional interpretation aids. Finally, we discuss how the findings of this project could be transferred to other use cases.