Abstract: Recent freshwater policy reforms in New Zealand promote increased community involvement in freshwater decision making and management. Involving community members in scientific monitoring increases both their knowledge and their ability to discuss this knowledge with professionals, potentially increasing their influence in decision-making processes. However, these interactions rarely occur because, in particular, of perceptions that…
Abstract: Ecological and environmental citizen-science projects have enormous potential to advance scientific knowledge, influence policy, and guide resource management by producing datasets that would otherwise be infeasible to generate. However, this potential can only be realized if the datasets are of high quality. While scientists are often skeptical of the ability of unpaid volunteers to…