Fig. 1.

Schematic of a generalised scientific process identifying where differences sources of uncertainty emerge in context to community science projects related to alien species. The different steps, or actions, are outlined and encapsulated within ovals, whereas the text in rectangles indicate outcomes generated by the actions. The process begins at A., with the occurrence of some phenomenon (e.g., arrival, spread) of an alien species to be investigated. Sources of uncertainty (Regan et al. 2002) are indicated where they arise across the process: the specific types of epistemic uncertainty are listed and linguistic uncertainty is identified in general. During the communication for both data collection (Step 3) and the results (Step 8), subjective judgement is relevant as it may influence the message made by the communicator(s) and thus the way the recipient audience perceives the information. The asterisks at ‘Identify question/aim’ (Step 1.) and between the ‘Data’ (B.) and ‘Data analyses’ (Step 6.) stages, indicate that for some projects, research questions may be generated post-data collection (e.g., projects that data mine biological databases). The dashed lines represent the potential for information learnt during any stage of the process to be integrated into subsequent actions for longer-term projects allowing the process to become refinements and improvements to be incorporated