EMBO reports cover ExCiteS work

A new report from Adam Gristwood in the journal EMBO reports is covering the work of ExCiteS as part of a report on Science and Society. The report is available here https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201948797 .

The section about ExCiteS opens with:

“Deep in the jungle

Some citizen science projects aim to engage fewer people, but at a deeper level of involvement. In the jungles of eastern and southern Cameroon, Muki Haklay, a geographer and a computer scientist, and Jerome Lewis, an anthropologist at University College London, UK, and their Extreme Citizen Science team work with the Baka, a community of hunter‐gatherers, to tackle illegal poaching of animals such as forest elephants, lowland gorillas and chimpanzees via a co‐developed app to monitor and report criminal activity. Data are then fed to the Zoological Society London, UK, where researchers and international law enforcement aim to understand how wildlife trafficking networks are operating. Anthropologists spend time with the communities to build up trust and define problems and devise ways to tackle them. “Some of the participants have never used smartphones before: it is critical to involve them in the design process in order to deliver something that makes sense to them in their specific environment,” said Haklay, who leads an European Research Council (ERC)‐funded project that aims to develop citizen science initiatives in some of the most remote places on earth…”