Ecological monitoring with citizen science: the design and implementation of schemes for recording plants in Britain and Ireland

Abstract

Interest in citizen science has been increasing rapidly, although the reviews available to date have not clearly outlined the links between the long-established practice of recording plant species' distributions for local and national atlases, or other recording projects, and the gradual development of more structured monitoring schemes that also rely on volunteer effort. We provide a review of volunteer-based plant monitoring in Britain and Ireland, with a particular focus on the contributions of expert volunteers working with biological recording schemes and natural history societies; in particular, we highlight projects and practices that have improved the quality of data collected. Although the monitoring of plant distributions at larger scales has led to numerous insights into floristic change and its causes, these activities have also led to the recognition that knowledge of species' abundances at finer-scales often provides a more powerful means of detecting and interpreting change. In the UK, this has led to the development of a new, abundance-based 'National Plant Monitoring Scheme'. We outline this new structured scheme, and review some of the design considerations that have been made during its development. New monitoring projects require a clear justification, and the launch of a new scheme is also an opportune moment to review whether some basic assumptions about the collection of monitoring data can withstand scrutiny. A distinction is often made between monitoring that is focused on answering particular, focused questions, and that which is more generally seeking to detect changes; for example, in species' distributions or abundances. Therefore, we also review the justification for such general 'surveillance' approaches to the monitoring of biodiversity, and place this in the context of volunteer-based initiatives. We conclude that data collected by biological recorders working within atlas or monitoring scheme frameworks will continue to produce datasets that are highly valued by governments, scientists, and the volunteers themselves.

Citizen Science as a Tool in Biological Recording—A Case Study of Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle

“…In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, citizen science has a long tradition that started as biological recordings performed by thousands of people across the country [44]. The contribution of volunteer experts to ecology and conservation has been very important in Britain and Ireland over the past 50 years [44][45][46]. In practice, however, there can be some difficulties in obtaining and analysing data gathered by citizen scientists, including double-counting [47].…”

“…On a global level, maps of invasive species distributions are usually created by gathering data from other sources such as herbaria, zoological collections, and research institutions [46], whereas at the local scale they typically result from extensive field work and mapping. There are complex and advanced systems for invasive species recording and distribution, including remote sensing (RS) [48], geographical information systems (GIS) [49][50][51][52], and geospatial technologies [53], but their application is expensive and reserved for the scientific community or highly skilled technicians, and are not of practical use at the local scale.…”

Exploring the role of smartphone technology for citizen science in agriculture

“…Non-professional people (lay persons/amateurs/volunteers) have participated in scientific research for several centuries, often contributing profound subject knowledge (Silvertown 2009;Pescott et al 2015). The involvement of volunteers in research is now commonly referred to as "citizen science", with recent years seeing a rapid increase in the number of citizen science initiatives available globally, particularly in Europe and North America (Silvertown 2009).…”

Estimates of observer expertise improve species distributions from citizen science data

“…Dealing with variation in observer skill at the stage of data analysis involves estimating how reporting rates vary among observers, in order to improve the accuracy and precision of ecological models (Farmer, Leonard, & Horn, ; Isaac et al., ; Tweddle et al., ). Expert observers will be able to identify species from more distant sightings or shorter bursts of song, which will give them higher reporting rates and on average they will record more species, all other things being equal (Kelling et al., ; Pescott et al., ). Moreover, the impact of the heterogeneity among observers is likely to vary across species, potentially biasing analyses that compare species.…”