Citizen Science as a Tool for Conservation in Residential Ecosystems

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Human activities, such as mining, forestry, and agriculture, strongly influence processes in natural systems. Because conservation has focused on managing and protecting wildlands, research has focused on understanding the indirect influence of these human activities on wildlands. Although a conservation focus on wildlands is critically important, the concept of residential area as an ecosystem is relatively new, and little is known about the potential of such areas to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity. As urban sprawl increases, it becomes urgent to construct a method to research and improve the impacts of management strategies for residential landscapes. If the cumulative activities of individual property owners could help conserve biodiversity, then residential matrix management could become a critical piece of the conservation puzzle. "Citizen science" is a method of integrating public outreach and scientific data collection locally, regionally, and across large geographic scales. By involving citizen participants directly in monitoring and active management of residential lands, citizen science can generate powerful matrix management efforts, defying the "tyranny of small decisions" and leading to positive, cumulative, and measurable impacts on biodiversity.

The Citizen Science Landscape: From Volunteers to Citizen Sensors and Beyond

“…The study successfully showed that the two citizen science led studies, Christmas Bird Count and Project FeederWatch, had comparable trends and patterns across the same time periods, suggesting that the data was consistent and not significantly influenced by different methods and biases. The benefit of these larger datasets is that they allow researchers to draw broader conclusions across large spatial or temporal scales, enabling researchers to make inferences and robust cases for causation over a larger areas, and at a finer resolution, in contrast with small scale studies which cannot be "generalised" over greater areas [3,6,9,11,38].…”

“…The dependability of volunteer-derived data is an old problem within biology and ecology, and therefore a number of methods to help to increase the reliability of the information gathered have been developed [6,22]. Firstly, the researchers must concisely and without jargon ask the right questions in the right way to get the quality of answer that is needed, and instructions and processes must be clear and as simple as possible [3,[9][10][11]. Projects are usually kept relatively simple; for example, they might include counting a few common avian species frequenting a feeding table rather than searching for rare or difficult to spot species [6,22,74,75].…”

“…Within the past two decades, use of volunteers in research has begun to proliferate and evolve into the current form of "citizen science" [6,7]. Citizen science, a term first coined by Irwin [7], is used to describe a form of research collaboration or data gathering that is performed by untrained or "nonexpert" individuals, often involving members of the public, and frequently thought of as a form of crowd-sourcing [1,[8][9][10][11][12].…”

ICT Services for open and citizen science

“…Finally, a new model of adaptive citizen science research has been introduced in [6]. This model advocates shifting management responsibilities to individual participants, with an additional iterative feedback loop.…”

Conservation opportunities across the world's anthromes

“…Redefining conservation goals given global change Conserving the stage Anderson & Ferree (2011) Implement conservation in a manner that maximizes potential evolutionary adaptive response to climate change as opposed to trying to save all species or picking winners Ecological connectivity Krosby et al (2010) Soften the matrix; increase connectivity to increase probability of persistence for many organisms as climate changes Intervention ecology Hobbs et al (2011) Rather than attempt to restore past systems, reinstate the capacity for ecosystem functions and processes Managed relocation Richardson et al (2009) Save species from effects of climate change by transporting them to areas where they have not previously occurred, also termed 'assisted colonization' and 'assisted migration' Novel ecosystems Seastedt et al (2008) Recognize new combinations of species under new abiotic conditions ('novel ecosystems') and focus on desired outcomes or trajectories Realignment Millar & Brubaker (2006) Realign or entrain ecosystems with current and expected future conditions rather than restoring to historical pre-disturbance conditions 4. Enhancing conservation through community engagement Citizen science Cooper et al (2007) Involve citizen participants directly in monitoring and management of residential lands to overcome 'tyranny of small decisions' to promote biodiversity Community-based management…”