Temporal trends in opportunistic citizen science reports across multiple taxa

Farmland biodiversity monitoring through citizen science: A review of existing approaches and future opportunities

Biodiversity monitoring in agricultural landscapes is important for assessing the effects of both land use change and activities that influence farmland biodiversity. Despite a considerable increase in citizen science approaches to biodiversity monitoring in recent decades, their potential in farmland-specific contexts has not been systematically examined. This paper therefore provides a comprehensive review of existing citizen science approaches involving biodiversity monitoring on farmland. Using three complementary methods, we identify a range of programmes at least partially covering farmland. From these, we develop a typology of eight programme types, reflecting distinctions in types of data collected and nature of volunteer involvement, and highlight their respective strengths and limitations. While all eight types can make substantial contributions to farmland biodiversity monitoring, there is considerable scope for their further development-particularly through increased engagement of farmers, for whom receiving feedback on the effects of their own practices could help facilitate adaptive management.

Inequality persists in a large citizen science programme despite increased participation through ICT innovations

Biological recording is a prominent and widely practised form of citizen science, but few studies explore long-term demographic trends in participation and knowledge production. We studied long-term demographic trends of age and gender of participants reporting to a large online citizen science multi-taxon biodiversity platform ( www.artportalen.se ). Adoption by user communities and continually developing Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) greatly increased the number of participants reporting data, but profound long-term imbalances in gender contribution across species groups persisted over time. Reporters identifying as male dominated in numbers, spent more days in the field reporting and reported more species on each field day. Moreover, an age imbalance towards older participants amplified over time. As the first long-term study of citizen participation by age and gender, our results show that it is important for citizen science project developers to account for cultural and social developments that might exclude participants, and to engage with underrepresented and younger participants. This could facilitate the breadth of engagement and learning across a larger societal landscape, ensure project longevity and biodiversity data representation (e.g. mitigate gender bias influence on the number of reports of different species groups).

Opportunities and challenges for monitoring a recolonizing large herbivore using citizen science

Monitoring is a prerequisite for evidence-based wildlife management and conservation planning, yet conventional monitoring approaches are often ineffective for species occurring at low densities. However, some species such as large mammals are often observed by lay people and this information can be leveraged through citizen science monitoring schemes. To ensure that such wildlife monitoring efforts provide robust inferences, assessing the quantity, quality, and potential biases of citizen science data is crucial. For Eurasian moose (Alces alces), a species currently recolonizing north-eastern Germany and occurring in very low numbers, we applied three citizen science tools: a mail/email report system, a smartphone application, and a webpage. Among these monitoring tools, the mail/email report system yielded the greatest number of moose reports in absolute and in standardized (corrected for time effort) terms. The reported moose were predominantly identified as single, adult, male individuals, and reports occurred mostly during late summer. Overlaying citizen science data with independently generated habitat suitability and connectivity maps showed that members of the public detected moose in suitable habitats but not necessarily in movement corridors. Also, moose detections were often recorded near roads, suggestive of spatial bias in the sampling effort. Our results suggest that citizen science-based data collection can be facilitated by brief, intuitive digital reporting systems. However, inference from the resulting data can be limited due to unquantified and possibly biased sampling effort. To overcome these challenges, we offer specific recommendations such as more structured monitoring efforts involving the public in areas likely to be roamed by moose for improving quantity, quality, and analysis of citizen science-based data for making robust inferences.

Enhancing Our Understanding of Ladybirds in Ireland – A Case Study of the Use of Citizen Science

Citizen science is increasingly recognised as a useful approach to contribute to biodiversity awareness while generating data and creating meaningful interactions among citizens and professional scientists. In a number of countries, academic institutions have led the way in developing ladybird projects, incorporating citizen science, to increase distributional data on the species, as well as a greater understanding of ladybird ecology. The current research evaluates the role of citizen science campaigns in collecting biological distributional data in Ireland, using ladybirds as a case example, examining if citizen science records and the use of photographs can provide a valuable insight into our understanding of ladybird ecology. From April 2020 to June 2021, a citizen science programme engaged with the wider public, via social media networks to increase the number of ladybird records and assist in establishing national data baselines, since ladybird rcording is a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland. This case study finds that citizen science projects using social media can increase the number of records of ladybirds and provide useful information on species distribution patterns. There were a disproportionate number of records from areas of high human population, resulting in a bias towards urban centres. Photographs submitted by members of the public provided a limited amount of information on food plants but indicated that ladybirds are valued as a species of interest to the public. These images can also help to increase records of the less common species, especially as members of the public may not be able to easily distinguish between different species of ladybirds.