Research on urban insect pollinators is changing views on the biological

Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and related biodiversity as ecosystem services to humanity. Despite the economic success of programs such as the Catskill/Delaware watershed management plan in the United States and the creation of global carbon exchanges, today's marketplace often fails to adequately protect biodiversity. We used a Marxist critique to explain one reason for this failure and to suggest a possible, if partial, response. Reframing ecosystem functions as economic services does not address the political problem of commodification. Just as it obscures the labor of human workers, commodification obscures the importance of the biota (ecosystem workers) and related abiotic factors that contribute to ecosystem functions. This erasure of work done by ecosystems impedes public understanding of biodiversity. Odum and Odum's radical suggestion to use the language of ecosystems (i.e., emergy or energy memory) to describe economies, rather than using the language of economics (i.e., services) to describe ecosystems, reverses this erasure of the ecosystem worker. Considering the current dominance of economic forces, however, implementing such solutions would require social changes similar in magnitude to those that occurred during the 1960s. Niklas Luhmann argues that such substantive, yet rapid, social change requires synergy among multiple societal function systems (i.e., economy, education, law, politics, religion, science), rather than reliance on a single social sphere, such as the economy. Explicitly presenting ecosystem services as discreet and incomplete aspects of ecosystem functions not only allows potential economic and environmental benefits associated with ecosystem services, but also enables the social and political changes required to ensure valuation of ecosystem functions and related biodiversity in ways beyond their measurement on an economic scale.

Citizen science-based approaches to monitor the natural environment tend to be bimodal in maturity. Older and established programs such as the Audubon's Christmas bird count and Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) have thousands of participants across decades of observations, while less mature citizen science projects have shorter lifespans often focused on local or regional observations with tens or hundreds of participants. For the latter, it can be difficult to transition into a more mature and sustainable citizen science-based research program. This paper focuses on this transition by evaluating CrowdHydrology (ca. 2010), a citizen science project that has transitioned from a regional to national network. It evaluates the data accuracy, citizen participation, and station popularity. The CrowdHydrology network asks citizens to send in text messages of water levels in streams and lakes, which has resulted in 16,294 observations submitted by over 8,000 unique participants at 120 unique locations. Using water level data and participation records from CrowdHydrology, we analyze the expansion and citizen participation from a regional to national citizen science network. We identify barriers to participation and evaluate why some citizen science observation stations are popular while others are not. We explore our chosen contributory program model for CrowdHydrology and the influence this model has had on long-term participation. Results demonstrate a highly variable rate of contributions of citizen scientists. This paper proposes hypotheses on why many of our observations are from one-time participants and why some monitoring stations are more popular than others. Finally, we address the future expansion of the CrowdHydrology network by evaluating successful monitoring locations and growing interest of watershed groups to expand the network of gauges.

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