Chairperson: Joerg Henning, Mark Stevenson 

Citizen science describes the formalized public participation in scientific inquiry and research. Citizen science has flourished in recent years due the public’s increased interest in participatory science and a better access to communication and data collection technology, while data collection by members of the public is also being encouraged by researchers due to their need for large-scale datasets. Thus, citizen science projects are increasing in numbers, but volunteer participation in scientific research poses considerable challenges, such as quality assurance, selection and misclassification biases. Citizen science data is being used across disciplines of veterinary research, for example to determine the distribution or the health status of wildlife species, to study the behaviours of dogs, to estimate the abundance of stray cats or to conduct vector surveillance associated with animal hosts.