Citizen Science as a Tool for Conservation in Residential Ecosystems

By C. Cooper, Janis Dickinson, T. Phillips, R. Bonney. 2007

727 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21481e10b2a8d37168bbfbb81160c4a74afd84d9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Citizen Science as a Tool for Augmenting Museum Collection Data from Urban Areas (2017, background): “These benefits of citizen science are especially apparent in urban areas, where large, dense, and diverse populations make volunteer recruitment easier (McCaffrey, 2005; Cooper et al., 2007; Dickinson et al., 2010; Ballard et al., 2017).”
Conservation opportunities across the world's anthromes (2014, background): “Citizen science Cooper et al. (2007) Involve citizen participants directly in monitoring and management of residential lands”
Biodiversity citizen science: Outcomes for the participating citizens (2021, background): “In fact, many CS projects assume or expect that participants benefit from their involvement in the project, for example, through changes in knowledge, attitudes or behaviour (Cooper et al., 2007).”
The Biological Records Centre: a pioneer of citizen science (2015, background): “There have been various studies proposing models to describe variation across different citizen science approaches (Cooper et al., 2007; Bonney et al., 2009a; Wiggins & Crowston, 2012; Haklay, 2013), but biological recording does not fit neatly into the current models, nor into the linear way in whi”
Creating a Successful Citizen Science Model to Detect and Report Invasive Species (2011, background): “For proper management of invasive species, there is not only a need for data on where they occur but also a need for that data to be freely and readily available to enable cost-effective responses by resource managers (Buhle et al. 2005, Delaney et al. 2008).”
From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science (2011, background): “[23] include additional details of research, education, and management goals, which are contrasted in a framework for integrating individual property owners in monitoring and active conservation efforts in residential areas.”
The eBird enterprise: An integrated approach to development and application of citizen science (2014, background): “Several important sources of bias have been discussed in the literature including variation among observers (Cooper et al., 2007; Yu et al., 2010), ''false absences'' owing to imperfect detection of organisms (McClintock et al., 2010), and uneven distributions of data in space and time (Boakes et…”
Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy (2009, background): “…by CLO projects have examined how bird populations change in distribution over time and space (Wells et al. 1998, Hochachka et al. 1999, Cooper et al. 2007, Bonter and Harvey 2008, Bonter et al. 2009); how breeding success is affected by environmental change (Rosenberg et al. 1999a,…”
A review of citizen science and community-based environmental monitoring: issues and opportunities (2011, background): “• Step 3: Create a communication plan (including achieving influence (Whitelaw et al. 2003), feeding back results and management recommendations (Cooper et al. 2007)).”
Recruitment Framework for Participatory Sensing Data Collections (2010, background): “By enabling people to investigate previously difficult to observe processes with devices they use everyday, participatory sensing brings the ideals of traditional community based data collection and citizen science to an online and mobile environment; offering automation, scalability, and real-time ”
Beyond scarcity: citizen science programmes as useful tools for conservation biogeography (2010, methodology): “Involving citizen participants directly in monitoring and active management of residential lands can generate very powerful management efforts, leading to positive, cumulative and measurable impacts on biodiversity (Cooper et al., 2007).”