Abstract
Citizen science has successfully contributed lichen records to air pollution assessments and for detecting biodiversity hotspots, while its potential to survey broad lichen distributions and trends in natural ecosystems is less clear. The main issue is whether non-professional observers would be willing to visit remote areas to record inconspicuous organisms. We launched a nationwide citizen science campaign “Ready! Set! Lichen!” in Estonia (Northern Europe) that focused on collecting digital photo-based data on lichen distributions comparatively on live trees in forests versus in cut-over sites. Altogether 1101 trees were surveyed by 362 participants. Of all observations, 86% were acceptable and revealed 86 species plus 33 morphospecies as identified by experts. For a test set of selected 12 common epiphytic species, the campaign expanded their known national distributions on average 13%, independently of their conspicuousness (thallus type). Our results indicated that a mass participation approach of citizen science: (i) can provide significant data to monitoring broad-scale population trends of common forest lichens, but the contributions remained small regarding (ii) the knowledge on rare and sparsely distributed habitat specialists and (iii) ecological factors behind the distributions (due to difficulties in keeping valid sampling design). We conclude that citizen-science projects on inconspicuous highly diverse taxon groups can contribute to conservation research if these projects are specifically designed for feasible goals, and we outline six main areas of application for lichen studies.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the more than 362 participants who voluntarily collected nationwide data of epiphytic lichens. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the diverse support from our colleagues (Tiina Randlane, Inga Jüriado, Kristiina Mark, Ave Suija) and the Estonian Fund for Nature team (Kertu Hool, Raul Kübarsepp, Mari Palolill, Mariliis Haljasorg). Two anonymous reviewers provided constructive comments on the manuscript.
Funding
This work was supported by the EU LIFE Programme (project LIFE16-GIE_EE_000665 “Piloting Natura2000 communication in Estonia”), Estonian Environmental Investment Centre, and Sigrid Rausing Trust. The Estonian Research Council (grants PRG1121 to AL and PRG874) and grant from the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence EcolChange; to PL) provided additional financial support.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data analysis was performed by Piret Lõhmus and Ovidiu Copoț. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Piret Lõhmus and Polina Degtjarenko; the other authors revised the draft. All authors read and approved the final draft of manuscript.
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Communicated by Pradeep K. Divakar.
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Online Resource 1
: Examples of the photos submitted to the campaign.
Online Resource 2
: Raw dataset of accepted observations.
Online Resource 3
: Summary of photoidentified lichen species.
Online Resource 4
: Summary of distribution data of the test set of selected 12 common epiphytic species.
Online Resource 5
: Distribution of Lecidea nylanderi in Estonia based on observations of the citizen science project and previously known records.
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Lõhmus, P., Degtjarenko, P., Lotman, S. et al. “Ready! Set! Lichen!”: a citizen-science campaign for lichens, against the odds of success. Biodivers Conserv 32, 4753–4765 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-023-02724-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-023-02724-6