TreeSnap: A citizen science app connecting tree enthusiasts and forest scientists

Abstract

For researchers, citizen science offers exciting opportunities to expand the range and scope of data collected and involve a broader and more diverse group of observers and data contributors (Pocock, Tweddle, Savage, Robinson, & Roy, 2017). By incorporating a large number of interested people working in parallel, citizen science has the potential to accelerate the pace or expand the scope of research projects. In today's world of constrained research funding, communicating the value of scientific research to the public is increasingly important yet avenues for sharing scientific research with general audiences are few and researchers typically have little institutional support for education and outreach activities, despite outreach

WorldForestID: Addressing the need for standardized wood reference collections to support authentication analysis technologies; a way forward for checking the origin and identity of traded timber

“…The passage of all samples from forest to Kew and beyond is being recorded on a smartphone application (https://app.world fores tid.org/) developed by colleagues at the University of Tennessee. This app, based on TreeSnap (Crocker et al, 2019) has been designed to capture field data including precise location coordinates and fraud prevention measures and meets the chain of custody needs of law enforcement.…”

Intersecting urban forestry and botanical gardens to address big challenges for healthier trees, people, and cities

“…Creating community “Tree Boards” of experts and interested citizens is recommended to provide assistance, direction, and expertise to government entities regarding the preservation, planting, management, and protection of trees. Tools are also available to help involve citizens in monitoring and protection of trees and forests (Crocker et al, ).…”

Citizen Science for Bio-indication: Development of a Community-Based Index of Ecosystem Integrity for Assessing the Status of Afrotropical Riverine Ecosystems

“…The approach has among others factors such as cost led to the push toward the inclusion of citizens in stewardship and monitoring of the status of natural resources (Brooks et al, 2005;Mochizuki and Yarime, 2016). While African countries have made a lot progress in this regard, especially on the involvement of communities in top-down decision making, and monitoring and management of natural resources, such as fisheries (Imende et al, 2005;Etiegni et al, 2017), forestry (Crocker et al, 2020), water resources (Bannatyne et al, 2017) and effects of climate change (Tesfahunegn and Gebru, 2020), the development of citizen science as an environmental assessment and monitoring approach is quite limited, and in most cases, it is at its nascent state (Requier et al, 2020).…”

“…Managers and non-governmental organizations are increasing their use of citizen volunteers to enhance their ability to monitor and manage natural resources, through tracking of species at risk and conserving protected areas (Conrad and Hilchey, 2011;McKinley et al, 2017;Crocker et al, 2020). However, in many places a comprehensive approach has not been developed on the use of socio-cultural knowledge and experiences in the assessment of the status of aquatic ecosystems (Reid et al, 2010).…”

“…One such approach is the application of sociocultural perspectives that uses indigenous knowledge and parameters in the creation of indices. More so, by integrating a large number of stakeholders, citizen science has the potential to directly connect scientists to the public and shares the importance of their work (Crocker et al, 2020). This could crack the challenge of communicating the value of scientific research to the public that is increasingly important yet in present world researchers typically have little support for outreach and education activities.…”