OpenMycoNet · Knowledge
Citizen Science at OpenMycoNet
Why broad participation and targeted expertise belong together — not as opposites, but as complements.
How to Get Involved
The network's results and data are open to everyone — even without running your own measurement node. Anyone who wants to operate a BioComm node can apply for one of the curated spots: borrow the hardware, download the BioComm software for free, place electrodes in the substrate. Analysis and anonymisation run locally on your own device before the data reaches the network.
The value comes from breadth: one measurement in Maintal, one in Osaka, one in São Paulo — together forming a dataset no single laboratory could produce. Climate zones, substrates and seasons differ worldwide; that spread is exactly what's needed to answer the open questions in the first place.
Scientific Evidence
Does Science by Amateurs Actually Work?
Citizen science has established itself as a research method in its own right. A methodological study of the iNaturalist platform shows that distributed observations by non-experts can produce scientifically valid data; the comparison project FunDive demonstrates what such infrastructure looks like in practice for fungal research.
A broader analysis covering numerous citizen-science projects reaches a clear but conditional conclusion: citizen-collected data can match or even exceed the accuracy of professional data collection. The condition: successful projects combine several methods at once — iterative project development, volunteer training and testing, expert validation, replication across multiple participants, and statistical modelling of systematic error. No single one of these methods is sufficient on its own.
OpenMycoNet's Own Position
Volunteers Plus an Expert Layer — Not Volunteers Instead of Experts
From this condition, OpenMycoNet draws its own strategic conclusion: broad public participation remains at the core of the project — it delivers the breadth and volume of measurement data no single laboratory could produce. In addition, OpenMycoNet is now searching more deliberately for node operators with relevant expertise: scientists, students, but also companies or individuals with a background in fungi or mycology. This layer is not meant to replace volunteers, but to safeguard interpretation, validation, and ultimately the scientific usability of the data collected.
eBird illustrates what such a hybrid model can look like in practice: a network of regional volunteer reviewers checks lay observations for anomalies and flags them as reliable, needing clarification, or unreliable — without taking the actual observation work away from volunteers.
Important for context: the research cited above establishes that hybrid models combining broad participation with expert validation can work in principle — it does not establish that OpenMycoNet's own implementation is already validated. There is no measurement data of our own for that yet. Here too: measurement data first, everything else after.
Read More
What the nodes actually measure is described on the Bioelectricity & BioComm page. The full list of studies is on the Sources page.