The unrealized potential of community science to support research on the resilience of protected areas

Abstract

To remain effective into the future, protected areas must be resilient to change. Evaluating the resilience of protected areas requires data across large spatial and temporal scales, which has proven to be a strength of community science in conservation research. Here, we assess the contributions of community science to different topics of protected area research and identify gaps where community science can be used more effectively. We performed a literature search aimed at capturing the research on resilient protected area design and management, then used Latent Dirichlet Allocation to model the topics represented in this corpus. Once topics were established, we searched for evidence of community science being used in each publication. Our analysis showed that there are five main areas of focus in resilient protected area research: biodiversity, climate change, connectivity, resources and ecosystem services, and social governance. We found limited evidence in the literature of community science directly assisting research in these areas. Community science has proven effective for extensive and cost-effective data collection in other situations; therefore, we recommend ways in which conservation managers and researchers can incorporate community science in the design and management of resilient protected areas.

Community science supports research on protected area resilience

“…In this respect, we believe the results of Binley et al (2021) are a significant step forward, identifying important trends in the literature and demonstrating that community science is nearly absent from broad academic discussions of the resilience of protected areas. As stated by the authors, this is problematic because community science presents an opportunity to expand protected areas research and more tightly integrate research and management strategies.…”

“…The place-based nature of community science extends to the language used to describe it; specific place names and other place-based language have been shown to be integral to conservation community science initiatives (Newman et al, 2017). As a result, literature reviews based on broad search terms, such as the general terms used by Binley et al (2021) to denote protected areas-"protected area," "reserve," "park," and "preserve,"-may fail to capture many examples of place-based community science. Inclusion of a sufficient number of synonymous search terms to capture the variation in language commonly used to describe key review concepts is critical for obtaining a representative sample of the literature (Bramer, de Jonge, Rethlefsen, Mast, & Kleijnen, 2018;Haddaway et al, 2020), and this limitation is compounded in a search focused on documents' abstracts, titles, and keywords, as with the Web of Science search employed by Binley et al ( 2021) (Bramer, Rethlefsen, Kleijnen, & Franco, 2017).…”

“…We expect that further examples could be retrieved by targeting specific place names or descriptors of protected areas and by substituting other broad search terms-for example, supplementing the general term "resilien*" with more context-dependent threats to resilience, such as "wildfire" or "sea level rise." Still, the community science initiatives identified by our search exhibit diverse strategies for addressing the five key research topics identified by Binley et al (2021) (Table 1).…”

“…T A B L E 1 Examples of community science initiatives that contribute to research on the resilience of protected areas in each of the five key research topics identified by Binley et al (2021). These examples were drawn from the 100 articles obtained through the example literature search described in this article and were not included in the set of articles reviewed by Binley et al (2021) (Binley, 2021)…”

Resilience of Avian Communities to Urbanization and Climate Change: an Integrative Review

“…Bird communities provide excellent case studies for ecological resilience because they are well-studied, perform a diverse array of ecological functions, and are important providers of ecosystem services (Sekercioglu, 2006;Bregman et al, 2016). Birds are also conspicuous to the general public, leading to an abundance of community science data that can be paired with climate and land-use data to assess the effects of these drivers on avian populations and community structure (Neate-Clegg et al, 2020;Binley et al, 2021). Because birds occupy a range of ecological functions (Sekercioglu, 2006), their community-level resilience may be indicative of ecosystem resilience (Fischer et al, 2007); and birds drive conservation efforts in many regions, particularly in biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al, 2000;Larsen et al, 2012).…”