According to Laure Turcati, Coordinator Lichens GO!It is possible to find a happy mediator: “We have to find a place to place the cursor between a simple and fun protocol, but its data will not be very quantitative, and a sharp and possibly inappropriate protocol, but its results can be exploited.” She explained that she was last week at the eighty-eighth conference of Acfas .

Lichens GO! It is a French program that studies lichens that grow on trees in cities. “Volunteers can participate in all stages of the research if they wish,” from problem formulation to interpretation of results, including data collection. For example, some volunteers asked for a simplification protocol Count the lichen, and to establish a a key To help them get to know them.

The programs also seek to provide feedback to the participants, meet their expectations, and reduce their frustrations. Thus, in Fiji NatureThere’s a participatory research program inside Schools, Attended 319 classes across France in 2019-2020. Teachers have asked to go beyond data collection in order to get students to think more inclusively, for example by comparing data collected between different schools. In response, Anne Dozier, coordinator at Vigie-Nature, explains, “We have published a a tool This makes it possible to centralize the data collected by groups and perform statistical tests on the entire database. Students can then come up with hypotheses and test them on their own, analyze trends and draw conclusions.

Participatory research shakes the image of the world alone in its ivory sign, by allowing everyone to embark on the adventure of producing knowledge. So much so, that in Vigie-Nature since 2003, the data collected has been used by the public in 20 scientific publications, out of 145 publications published by the organization.

Chloe Burkin

Photo: Don Diebold / Flickr