The necessity of biodiversity monitoring and citizen science - Denis COUVET

A global terrestrial species monitoring program is necessary, to enable researchers and policymakers to better know and understand the status and trends of biodiversity. The necessity is to design and implement an integrated information chain from monitoring to policy reporting, to create and implement minimal data standards and common monitoring protocols to be able to inform Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs).

We will examine how citizen science contributes to such a globally coordinated approach, through monitoring; the different configurations of citizen science networks, from consultative to transformative ones, their relationships with scientific and social objectives, and their complementarities. Their unique scientific contribution is due to the possibilities for data to have a large spatial extent, contributing decisively to community ecology, dynamics and responses to global change.