People and Nature (2025)
Our article, “Community (citizen) science for nature’s benefits: a systematic review and survey” looks at the feasibility of utilizing community science projects and data to overcome challenges in assessing and monitoring nature’s benefits (defined as ecosystem services + natural capital).
Using the UK as a case study, our paper is the first to combine a systematic review, a survey of community scientists, and a comparison of nature benefits guidance with current community science initiatives to evaluate this.
We found that: 🌳 Current UK community science does assess nature’s benefits, primarily related to biodiversity, which underpins all other nature’s benefits. 🪱 However, there are gaps in the current community science landscape around cultural benefits, benefits from aquatic environments, and soils and minerals. 🤚 There were also divergences between the published scientific literature on nature’s benefits community science and the experiences of UK community sciences 🌟 The key end take-aways from the paper include: 1) There is significant potential for community science to inform the assessment of nature’s benefits in line with UK guidance, but few programmes currently address this explicitly. 2) Policy and funding support are needed to expand direct assessments of nature’s benefits through community science programmes and address significant gaps for underrepresented benefits in community science. 3) There is also a need to expand current UK guidance on nature’s benefits to explicitly include community science.
