Abstract
Managing invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans and P. miles) in the Western Atlantic Ocean is beyond the capacity of natural resource organizations alone. In response, organizations have mobilized members of the public and citizen scientists to help. We used a structured survey to assess the activities and perceptions of 71 organizations that engage the public and citizen scientists in lionfish research and management throughout the invaded range of the Western Atlantic. Five case studies were also conducted that exemplified varied and multi-pronged approaches to engagement of the public and citizen scientists in lionfish control, monitoring, and knowledge-sharing. The public has been engaged to some extent in every approach, but organizations most frequently indicated engaging members of the public in raising awareness, promoting consumption, organized culling/removal, tournaments, and data collection. Sixty-five percent of organizations surveyed engaged the public in data collection, and data collection was ranked as the scientific research activity in which the public is most often involved. Most organizations indicated their data has contributed to scientific publications, management, and government agency research and/or policy. Collectively these findings demonstrate the conservation value of citizen scientists to assist organizational efforts to control, manage, and study a large-scale marine invasion.
Highlights
The 71 structured survey respondents collectively represent organizations whose work on lionfish management covers most of the tropical Western Atlantic (Figure 1)
While we did not investigate the exact linkage between citizen scientists and final impacts, our results show that most organizations that engage citizen scientists have contributed their data to scientific publications, to government agency research, or used it to inform management, providing an opportunity to connect citizen scientists with outcomes
Our results show that lionfish citizen scientists are engaged in diverse approaches to management, such as actual removal of the invasive, providing direct conservation value to their work [62]
Summary
Citizen science is referred to by a wide variety of other terms [6]; we prefer the use of “participatory science” as some members of our research group found “citizen” to potentially be exclusionary. Most definitions describe citizen science as involving knowledge generation through participation of the public in research [6,7]. In the context of marine biological invasions, citizen scientists can allow for early detection [8,9,10,11,12] and can help monitor the structure, distribution, behavior, and dynamics of invasive populations [13,14]. Citizen scientists can be engaged to support management of invasive species, to the extent that this involves removals [15]
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