Citizen science has advanced science for hundreds of years, contributed to many peer-reviewed articles, and informed land management decisions and policies across the United States. Over the last 10 years, citizen science has grown immensely in the United States and many other countries. Here, we show how citizen science is a powerful tool for tackling many of the challenges faced in the field of conservation biology. We describe the two interwoven paths by which citizen science can improve conservation efforts, natural resource management, and environmental protection. The first path includes building scientific knowledge, while the other path involves informing policy and encouraging public action. We explore how citizen science is currently used and describe the investments needed to create a citizen science program. We find that:1. Citizen science already contributes substantially to many domains of science, including conservation, natural resource, and environmental science. Citizen science informs natural resource management, environmental protection, and policymaking and fosters public input and engagement. 2. Many types of projects can benefit from citizen science, but one must be careful to match the needs for science and public involvement with the right type of citizen science project and the right method of public participation. 3. Citizen science is a rigorous process of scientific discovery, indistinguishable from conventional science apart from the participation of volunteers. When properly designed, carried out, and evaluated, citizen science can provide sound science, efficiently generate high-quality data, and help solve problems.

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Despite many studies showing that landscape corridors increase dispersal and species richness for disparate taxa, concerns persist that corridors can have unintended negative effects. In particular, some of the same mechanisms that underlie positive effects of corridors on species of conservation interest may also increase the spread and impact of antagonistic species (e.g., predators and pathogens), foster negative effects of edges, increase invasion by exotic species, increase the spread of unwanted disturbances such as fire, or increase population synchrony and thus reduce persistence. We conducted a literature review and meta-analysis to evaluate the prevalence of each of these negative effects. We found no evidence that corridors increase unwanted disturbance or non-native species invasion; however, these have not been well-studied concerns (1 and 6 studies, respectively). Other effects of corridors were more often studied and yielded inconsistent results; mean effect sizes were indistinguishable from zero. The effect of edges on abundances of target species was as likely to be positive as negative. Corridors were as likely to have no effect on antagonists or population synchrony as they were to increase those negative effects. We found 3 deficiencies in the literature. First, despite studies on how corridors affect predators, there are few studies of related consequences for prey population size and persistence. Second, properly designed studies of negative corridor effects are needed in natural corridors at scales larger than those achievable in experimental systems. Third, studies are needed to test more targeted hypotheses about when corridor-mediated effects on invasive species or disturbance may be negative for species of management concern. Overall, we found no overarching support for concerns that construction and maintenance of habitat corridors may result in unintended negative consequences. Negative edge effects may be mitigated by widening corridors or softening edges between corridors and the matrix. Other negative effects are relatively small and manageable compared with the large positive effects of facilitating dispersal and increasing diversity of native species.

Surface coal mining operations alter landscapes of the Appalachian Mountains, United States, by replacing bedrock with mine spoil, altering topography, removing native vegetation, and constructing mine soils with hydrologic properties that differ from those of native soils. Research has demonstrated hydrologic effects of mining and reclamation on Appalachian landscapes include increased peakflows at newly mined and reclaimed watersheds in response to strong storm events, increased subsurface void space, and increased base flows. We review these investigations with a focus on identifying changes to hydrologic flow paths caused by surface mining for coal in the Appalachian Mountains. We introduce two conceptual control points that govern hydrologic flow paths on mined lands, including the soil surface that partitions infiltration vs. surface runoff and a potential subsurface zone that partitions subsurface storm flow vs. deeper percolation. Investigations to improve knowledge of hydrologic pathways on reclaimed Appalachian mine sites are needed to identify effects of mining on hydrologic processes, aid development of reclamation methods to reduce hydrologic impacts, and direct environmental mitigation and public policy.

Systematic conservation planning efforts typically focus on protecting current patterns of biodiversity. Climate change is poised to shift species distributions, reshuffle communities, and alter ecosystem functioning. In such a dynamic environment, lands selected to protect today's biodiversity may fail to do so in the future. One proposed approach to designing reserve networks that are robust to climate change involves protecting the diversity of abiotic conditions that in part determine species distributions and ecological processes. A set of abiotically diverse areas will likely support a diversity of ecological systems both today and into the future, although those two sets of systems might be dramatically different. Here, we demonstrate a conservation planning approach based on representing unique combinations of abiotic factors. We prioritize sites that represent the diversity of soils, topographies, and current climates of the Columbia Plateau. We then compare these sites to sites prioritized to protect current biodiversity. This comparison highlights places that are important for protecting both today's biodiversity and the diversity of abiotic factors that will likely determine biodiversity patterns in the future. It also highlights places where a reserve network designed solely to protect today's biodiversity would fail to capture the diversity of abiotic conditions and where such a network could be augmented to be more robust to climate-change impacts.

Anthropogenic salinization of freshwaters is a global concern. Coal surface mining causes release of dissolved sulfate, bicarbonate, calcium, magnesium, and other ions to surface waters in central Appalachia, USA, through practices that include mine rock disposal in valley fills (VFs). This region's surface waters naturally have low salinity, with specific conductance (SC, a salinity indicator) generally <200 lS/cm, and aquatic impacts have been found when SC exceeds the 300 to 500 lS/cm range. We analyzed SC in waters emerging from 137 VFs over periods of 1 to 23 years. Mean SCs for these VFs ranged from 227 to 2,866 lS/cm, generally rose during and immediately following construction, but often declined during latter portions of longer monitoring records. Seventy-four of 103 VFs with postconstruction data had SC trends that fit negative quadratic forms. Of the 16 revegetated VFs with at least five years of SC data past the quadratic maximum, the mean quadratic maximum was 1,464 (AE696) lS/cm and the model projected time required to approach natural conditions (by declining to <500 lS/cm) was 19.6 (AE6.6) years after VF construction initiation, indicating long-lasting but not permanent aquatic impacts due to elevated (>500 lS/cm) SC.(KEY TERMS: total dissolved solids; salinity; conductivity; surface mining; excess spoil.) Evans, Daniel M

Habitat corridors confer many conservation benefits by increasing movement of organisms between habitat patches, but the benefits for some species may exact costs for others. For example, corridors may increase the abundance of consumers in a habitat to the detriment of the species they consume. In this study we assessed the impact of corridors on insect herbivory of a native plant, Solanum americanum, in large-scale, experimentally fragmented landscapes. We quantified leaf herbivory and assessed fruit production as a proxy for plant fitness. We also conducted field surveys of grasshoppers (Orthoptera), a group of abundant, generalist herbivores that feed on S. americanum, and we used exclosure cages to explicitly link grasshopper herbivory to fruit production of individual S. americanum. The presence of corridors did not increase herbivory or decrease plant fruit production. Likewise, corridors did not increase grasshopper abundance. Instead, patches in our landscapes with the least amount of edge habitat and the greatest amount of warmer "core" area had the highest levels of herbivory, the largest cost to plant fruit production as a result of herbivory, and the most grasshoppers. Thus habitat quality, governed by patch shape, can be more important than connectivity for determining levels of herbivory and the impact of herbivory on plant fitness in fragmented landscapes.

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