Conservation and Management Applications of the Reef Volunteer Fish Monitoring Program

Pattengill-Semmens, Christy V.; Semmens, Brice X.

doi:10.1007/978-94-017-0299-7_5

Cited by 73 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Although not an unexpected outcome, demonstrating knowledge gain among participants is particularly relevant for volunteer environmental monitoring programs, which often set out to educate particular audiences (Pattengill-Semmens andSemmens 2003, Brewer 2006). Thus, its prevalence as a reported outcome addresses a need of many volunteer monitoring efforts.…”

Section: Exploring Findings and Identifying Knowledge Gapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual- and community-level impacts of volunteer environmental monitoring: a synthesis of peer-reviewed literature

Stepenuck¹,

Green²

2015

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Citizens have long contributed to scientific research about the environment through volunteer environmental monitoring programs. Their participation has also resulted in outcomes for themselves, their communities, and the environment. This research synthesizes 35 peer-reviewed journal articles that reported such outcomes through 2012. This collection of articles was derived from a pool of 436 peer-reviewed journal articles about participatory environmental monitoring. Reported outcomes for participants and communities ranged from increasing personal knowledge and community awareness to changing attitudes and behaviors, building social capital, and ultimately, influencing change in natural resource management and policies. Mixed results were reported in regard to citizen participation in natural resource decision-making processes and in terms of participant knowledge gain. Future research recommendations that address identified knowledge gaps include the following: (1) assessing knowledge beyond the basic content of the subject of monitoring to better address the value of volunteer environmental monitoring as a public participation tool; (2) conducting independent research across programs to enable null or negative outcome reporting, understand commonalities of outcomes across programs, and make linkages between outcomes and program characteristics; (3) carrying out rigorous research that includes data collection and statistical analysis focused on the effectiveness of citizen participation in decision making; (4) assessing the time component of outcome achievement to inform the volunteer monitoring community; and (5) conducting additional research to identify changes in attitudes and behaviors, particularly geared toward minimizing losses in biodiversity and impacts of climate change.

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Section: Exploring Findings and Identifying Knowledge Gapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual- and community-level impacts of volunteer environmental monitoring: a synthesis of peer-reviewed literature

Stepenuck¹,

Green²

2015

E&S

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“…To gain a better understanding of a complex environment such as a coral reef, collecting data for long-term monitoring of these environments is essential. Long-term monitoring of a coral reef environment can however be labour intensive, requiring divers to identify and count the fish species in a certain area [26]. A number of disadvantages of the data collected by divers have been discussed in the literature [14], including that the presence of divers may affect the fish assemblage, and that divers differ in their experience and ability to identify species.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A research tool for long-term and continuous analysis of fish assemblage in coral-reefs using underwater camera footage

Boom

Palazzo

et al. 2014

Ecological Informatics

121

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We present a research tool that supports marine ecologists' research by allowing analysis of long-term and continuous fish monitoring video content. The analysis can be used for instance to discover ecological phenomena such as changes in fish abundance and species composition over time and area. Two characteristics set our system apart from traditional ecological data collecting and processing methods. First, the continuous video recording results in enormous data volumes of monitoring data. Currently around a year of video recordings (containing over the 4 million fish observations) have been processed. Second, different from traditional manual recording and analysing the ecological data, the whole recording, analysing and presentation of results is automated in this system. On one hand, it saves the effort of manually examining every video, which is infeasible. On the other hand, no automatic video analysis method is perfect, so the user interface provides marine ecologists with multiple options to verify the data. Marine ecologists can examine the underlying videos, check results of automatic video analysis at different certainty levels computed by our system, and compare results generated by multiple versions of automatic video analysis software to verify the data in our system. This research tool enables marine ecologists for the first time to analyse long-term and continuous underwater video records.

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“…Citizen science complements and enhances more conventional scientific studies (Eden 1996, Heiman 1997, Au et al 2000, Pattengill-Semmens and Semmens 2003. The role of citizen science in the realm of ecological monitoring is particularly valuable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The role of citizen science in the realm of ecological monitoring is particularly valuable. Governments often do not have the resources to generate the baseline and on-going monitoring data required to address complex environmental issues because ecological monitoring is expensive, labor intensive, and time consuming (Au et al 2000, Pattengill-Semmens andSemmens 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen, Science, Highways, and Wildlife: Using a Web-based GIS to Engage Citizens in Collecting Wildlife Information

Lee¹,

Quinn²,

Duke³

2006

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Road Watch in the Pass is a citizen-science project that engages local citizens in reporting wildlife observations along a 44-km stretch of Highway 3 through Crowsnest Pass in southwestern Alberta, Canada. The numbers of wildlife vehicle collisions and a recent proposal to expand the highway have raised concerns from both human safety and wildlife conservation perspectives. Through the use of a web-based GIS, interested citizens can contribute information that will be instrumental in making final decisions concerning measures to mitigate the effects of highway expansion. Currently, 58 people have contributed over 713 observations to Road Watch. We performed a preliminary comparison of 11 months of Road Watch observations and wildlife mortality data for the same time period to demonstrate that the use of citizen science not only augments more conventional approaches, but also results in the emergence of new knowledge and insights. A Kappa index of agreement of 14% indicates poor agreement between the data sets, highlighting that wildlife successfully cross the highway in areas not identified by the wildlife mortality data. This has important implications for design and mitigation efforts for Highway 3 and other roadways.

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Conservation and Management Applications of the Reef Volunteer Fish Monitoring Program

Cited by 73 publications

References 2 publications

Individual- and community-level impacts of volunteer environmental monitoring: a synthesis of peer-reviewed literature

Individual- and community-level impacts of volunteer environmental monitoring: a synthesis of peer-reviewed literature

A research tool for long-term and continuous analysis of fish assemblage in coral-reefs using underwater camera footage

Citizen, Science, Highways, and Wildlife: Using a Web-based GIS to Engage Citizens in Collecting Wildlife Information

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