Mapping trainings in citizen science
Cléa Montanari
April 9, 2025, 8:46 a.m.
As the project manager of the European Citizen Science Academy I am very intrigued to know what kind of training is ongoing in European countries — as there are many; but they are not so easy to find, if you, yourself are not part of the country, or do not speak the language, and or do not make a business trip there.
The European Citizen Science Academy would like to know, and also facilitate the knowledge of what is going on at a European level in relation to training in citizen science. This is 1) not to reinvent the wheel of training, 2) foster collaborations and initiatives and cross-pollination of what is going on at national level.
To share your training and or knowledge about what trainings are going on in your country, please email me at clea.montanari@learningplanetinstitute.org
Below you will find a list of training in the field of citizen science from different countries in Europe. These trainings vary in audiences, topics etc. They are by far not exhaustive and most sources come from our network of educators and trainers.
If you are an educator or trainer in the field of citizen science and would like to join our network, please subscribe to our mailing list, sending an email to ecs.academy-subscribe@eu-citizne.science.
Austria
| The OeAD offers training in preparation for the Citizen Science Award. An award is for school teachers, one for non-formal educators to mediate the participation of school classes and youth groups, as well as families. You can find more information here.
In addition The OeAD Working Group “CS with Schools” is currently preparing to run a teacher training on the basics of citizen science in late November in cooperation with the College of Teacher Training Vienna. The first version was delivered in November 2024. |
Ireland | Network member Dave Wall from the National Biodiversity Data Center shared citizen science trainings: This course is designed to enable beginners and those wishing to refresh their recording skills to identify and record common marine intertidal species found around the Irish coastline.
Since 2019 Dave Wall has delivered an annual lecture to undergraduate students at several Irish Universities as an introduction to Marine Biodiversity Citizen Science. |
Croatia | A book published by Tomislav Ivanjko and colleagues on citizen science Tomislav teaches an elective course for PhD students on "Crowdsourcing and gamification in heritage", where basic principles of citizen science approaches are covered. The Center for Continuing Professional Development of Librarians has a webinar on Citizen Science in Libraries and a workshop Citizen Science in my public library (both in Croatian). The workshop is organized in cooperation with county libraries. There are 23 counties in Croatia and each of them have a central county library. The aim is to visit them all and to have workshops and spread the knowledge on citizen science. Both webinars and workshops are a great success and there are many librarians attending. An article was written that report on the analysis of results from webinars and questionnaires attendees filled out Exploring the Perspectives of Croatian Librarians on Citizen Science
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Slovakia | Citizen science is mentioned in general Open Science courses organized for librarians and interested scientists An online course on citizen science Let’s start with Citizen Science (Začnime si s občianskou vedou) on the eu-citizen.science platform Online talk on citizen science for Comenius University PhD students.
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Portugal | In the scope of the OTTERS project, Nuclio coordinates a 50h teacher training course with 159 teachers from all school cycles from different parts of Portugal. All of them had a 3h session about citizen science in the scope of sustainability citizenship in partnership with the Synapses project. After this, many of them have decided to further explore the theme of citizen science and develop projects with their students. Nuclio has created an online journey to support the training in Portuguese. |
Serbia | University Library “Svetozar Marković” Accredited seminars for librarians in 2024 Librarians as a Link between Science and Citizens |
Hungary | LIBER, Training for research libraries: Developing Citizen Science, Budapest |
Switzerland | A Citizen Science School hosted by the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich and jointly organised by Citizen Science Zurich and the UZH Graduate Campus invites early-career researchers and citizen science practitioners to an immersive week of learning and collaboration. Next one is in 2026. |
France | The Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris has a 5 day course every year on participatory sciences.
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Germany | The Berlin School of Public Engagement offers several training to build capacity and competence for Public Engagement and participation with research |
United Kingdom | UCL is running three courses that are dedicated to citizen science. One in the autumn, and two in the winter https://www.ucl.ac.uk/module-catalogue/modules/foundations-of-citizen-science-BIOS0035
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/module-catalogue/modules/introduction-to-citizen-science-and-scientific-crowdsourcing-GEOG0152
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/module-catalogue/modules/designing-and-managing-citizen-science-GEOG0179 |
