The role of citizen science in conservation under the telecoupling framework

Abstract

Citizen science is increasingly utilized to empower people to participate in conservation work and research. Despite the profusion of citizen science projects in conservation, many lacked a coherent analytical framework for understanding broad-scale transnational human-species interactions. The telecoupling framework provides a means to overcome this limitation. In this study, we use the monarch butterfly, a migratory species of high conservation value, to illustrate how citizen science data can be utilized in telecoupling research to help inform conservation decisions. We also address the challenges and limitations of this approach and provide recommendations on the future direction of citizen-based projects to overcome these challenges. The integration of citizen-based science and the telecoupling framework can become the new frontier in conservation because the applications of citizen science data in distant human-environment relationships have rarely been explored, especially from coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) perspectives.