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A typology for strategies to connect citizen science and management

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Abstract

One of the often cited benefits of citizen science is better connecting citizens and their science to adaptive management outcomes. However, there is no consensus as to whether this is a reasonable expectation, and if so, how best to approach creating a successful link to management. This review finds cases where the citizen science–management link is explicitly discussed and places each case into a meta-analysis framework that will help define some general successful approaches to forming such a link. We categorize the types of linkages between citizen science and management along two main axes: cooperative to adversarial and deliberate to serendipitous. Cooperative and deliberate types of linkages are the most common, likely due to a mix of causes: that such links are the most commonly written about in the scientific literature, because such links tend to exist for longer amounts of time, and because other types of links tend to drift toward the cooperative/deliberate approach over time.

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Acknowledgments

A.F. developed this review to help the California Citizen Science Initiative (CCSI) which investigated how citizen science can contribute to marine protected area management. “We” in this paper refers to the whole CCSI team and their hard work is much appreciated: R. Meyer, H. Ballard, F. Shilling, O. Boyle, M. Hall-Arber, J. Freiwald, and L. Fortmann. The CCSI was supported by the Packard Foundation.

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  1. Virginia Sea Grant/NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, 1208 Greate Rd, Gloucester Point, VA, 23062, USA

    Amy Freitag

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Freitag, A. A typology for strategies to connect citizen science and management. Environ Monit Assess 188, 519 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-016-5513-y

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