The unrealized potential of community science to support research on the resilience of protected areas

Abstract

To remain effective into the future, protected areas must be resilient to change. Evaluating the resilience of protected areas requires data across large spatial and temporal scales, which has proven to be a strength of community science in conservation research. Here, we assess the contributions of community science to different topics of protected area research and identify gaps where community science can be used more effectively. We performed a literature search aimed at capturing the research on resilient protected area design and management, then used Latent Dirichlet Allocation to model the topics represented in this corpus. Once topics were established, we searched for evidence of community science being used in each publication. Our analysis showed that there are five main areas of focus in resilient protected area research: biodiversity, climate change, connectivity, resources and ecosystem services, and social governance. We found limited evidence in the literature of community science directly assisting research in these areas. Community science has proven effective for extensive and cost-effective data collection in other situations; therefore, we recommend ways in which conservation managers and researchers can incorporate community science in the design and management of resilient protected areas.