Better Data Quality in Citizen Science (I): Structured vs Unstructured data collection and potential biases

In the context of global socio-ecological crisis and sustainable development goals, society is demanding more and better information to implement evidence-based policies. Participatory programs could play an important role in providing part of the required information. This presentation evaluates several observational challenges for optimal information retrieval and how participatory methods are trying to solve them. It is compared different approaches for data collection: structured and unstructured. The presentation evaluates as well the potential biases (temporal, spatial and taxonomical, this last one when observations are related to biodiversity monitoring), using some examples from existing bibliography