Sharks and Citizen Science

Traditionally, academic science has used graduate students to collect data in many cases, but community science, the term by which <i>citizen science</i> is also known, has revolutionized the process by which large amounts of data can be collected accurately by large numbers of non-scientists under the training and mentorship of scientists. There has been some discussion in the scientific community about whether the data collected by citizen scientists is as scientifically valid as data collected by traditional methods and this is a fair question to ask^{. 1}