  Analysing patterns of engagement among citizen science participants can
provide important insights into the organisation and practice of individual
citizen science projects. In particular, methods from statistics and network
science can be used to understand different types of user behaviour and user
interactions to help the further implementation and organization of community
efforts. Using publicly available data from the iNaturalist community and their
yearly City Nature Challenges (CNC) from 2017-2020 as an example; we showcase
computational methods to explore the spatio-temporal evolution of this citizen
science community that typically interacts in a hybrid offline-online way. In
particular, we investigate the user types present in the community along with
their interactions, finding significant differences in usage-behavior on both
the level of engagement and the types of community tasks/roles and how they
interact with the network of contributors. We expect that these computational
analysis strategies will be useful to gain further understanding of other
citizen science communities and projects.
