Monitoring Marine Protected Areas with Citizen Science

Citizen science – the involvement of non-scientists in the production of scientific knowledge – can generate biodiversity data at spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales difficult to achieve by other approaches. Our team – a collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences (Academy), the California Ocean Protection Council, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife – is building the capacity to make use of the Academy’s ongoing citizen science initiatives and crowd-sourced observations to understand and monitor biodiversity across California’s Marine Protected Area (MPA) network. Relevant citizen science initiatives include Snapshot Cal Coast – an annual statewide effort to engage people to document California’s coastal biodiversity across all of the state’s coastal counties – and iNaturalist – a technological platform, which facilitates the recording, sharing and visualization of detailed biodiversity information. In this talk, I show how the tens of thousands of coastal biodiversity observations generated every year via these initiatives represent our best-available real-time observatory of the California coast and can provide an early-warning system for significant biodiversity change both within and outside the MPA network. Moreover, these data can enable uncovering the relationships among MPAs across space and time, thus facilitating the adaptive management of these areas as a connected network. I conclude by providing recommendations to further increase the usefulness of these and similar citizen science data to monitor MPAs and help fulfill the State of California’s long-term MPA Monitoring Action Plan.