Data Quality Resource Compendium:

The Quality Assurance/ Quality Control Project team of the CSA Data and Metadata Working Group has compiled a compendium of guidance documents, manuals, and workbooks produced for citizen science. The resulting spreadsheet is a treasure-trove of resources for monitoring program coordinators, project leads, and volunteer trainers. Each entry provides a link to the resource, information about the authors and intended audience, and which aspects of the data management cycle are addressed. The compendium is the first step in a project to identify gaps and needs for additional resources to support citizen science programs.

The Data Quality Resources for Citizen and Community Science table is intended to be a living library. Collated and described by a group of volunteers, it’s current form is a starting point and represents the resources we were able to identify at the time of its creation. We note that there are gaps in coverage representing some science areas, geographic/political contexts, and stages of the data lifecycle. 

Additional Data Resources:


This list of resources was curated by the Data and Metadata Working Group. The resource compendium is updated annually by group members in CSA Connect. Additional resources were last updated in 2020.


PPSR Core is a set of global, transdisciplinary data and metadata standards for use in  Public Participation in Scientific Research (Citizen Science) projects. These standards are united, supported, and underlined by a common framework illustrating how information is structured within the citizen science domain. This allows data to be used across platforms and projects in a consistent manner, furthering the research goals of the scientific community. Read the standard here.

PPSR Core is maintained by the CSA’s working group for Data & Metadata.