Exploring citizen science in Sweden: insights from the ECS Ambassador
Lotta
Oct. 15, 2025, 11 a.m.
Lotta W Tomasson | ECS Ambassador for Sweden
As a Citizen Science Ambassador in Sweden, my organisation, Public & Science Sweden, and I aim to raise awareness about citizen science, spread its benefits, and strengthen it in Sweden, Europe, and beyond.
Sweden has a long and strong tradition in monitoring biodiversity and wildlife population dynamics through voluntary efforts. The Swedish Bird Survey, the Swedish Species Observation System, the Swedish Plant Watch (Floraväktarna), and wildlife data (viltdata) all include standardised monitoring methods trusted by governmental authorities for management decisions and regional and international reporting. Still, the organisations managing these efforts often do not call them citizen science. In addition, other governmental agencies and researchers at universities interact with volunteers as part of a research or monitoring project without calling it (and probably not even realising that it is) citizen science. Often these projects seem to lack essential components of citizen science, may it be volunteer-adapted, transparent methods, no platform to interact or learn between participants, a suitable communication strategy or even any kind of proper feedback.
To really enhance the work of learning from each other and meet in dialogue within and between citizen science projects in Sweden, we are now trying to build a new chapter by bringing in a new employee at Public & Science Sweden. We welcome Kjell Bolmgren, Assistant Secretary General & Researcher. For ten years, he developed and coordinated a citizen science project on climate change effects, where volunteers documented nature’s calendar in a standardised and similar way to what had been done historically all over Sweden. Kjell is also a maths and science teacher. He now works at Public and Science Sweden to develop our activities towards pupils and teachers, as well as on citizen science.
With his expertise and my long experience in science communication, we hope to join ECS project aims to strengthen citizen science in Sweden and Europe. First of all, we will try to bring the Swedish citizen science community together by building on experiences from our European network and from a previous Swedish project (e.g. ARCS; medborgarforskning.se; Mass experiments). By including citizen science in our resource and support centre, we plan to establish Public & Science Sweden as a national node for citizen science. Researchers within the health sector already use PPI and Co-Creation methods, but in most other cases, researchers in Sweden have no other expectation from citizen science than voluntary support in data collection. Here, we find inspiration from other countries, where universities offer courses in “science and society”, where the truly beneficial method of citizen science as a trust-building and two-way learning scientific method is an integrated part.
At the moment, Public & Science Sweden is connecting with the biodiversity monitoring community as well as authorities and researchers that are already running citizen science-like projects to bring them together in a national network. The ambition, of course, is that by establishing a community, project leaders will benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience, and that we can create better coordination and attention for citizen science in Sweden. In addition, we are actively reaching out to scientists in other disciplines, e.g. studies of environmental burden and socio-economy, security, soil and freshwater biodiversity, future studies, pedagogy and vector-borne diseases. Almost all Swedish Universities are members of our organisation, so by establishing Public & Science Sweden as a national resource and support centre, we hope that our members will understand the benefits of citizen science better and support our development.
Illustration caption: Citizen science involves researchers co-creating with the public in some way during the research process. Illustration by: Lotta W Tomasson/Public & Science Sweden CC BY-NC 2.0