3 November 2025
New paper: The Role of Community Science in DNA-Based Biodiversity Monitoring
A new BGE paper has been published! The paper called ‘The Role of Community Science in DNA-Based Biodiversity Monitoring’ was written by Carolina Corrales, Karolina Bacela-Spychalska, Elena Buzan, Torbjørn Ekrem, Sónia Ferreira, William Goodall-Copestake, Elaine van Ommen Kloeke, Peter M. Hollingsworth and Sarah J. Bourlat.
The paper presents an overview of the complementarity between community science and DNA-based biomonitoring through examples from ongoing projects.
Abstract
The mutual interest in nature by the general public and scientists has led to many collaborations, past and present. Community science shows great potential for monitoring species occurrences and distributions, especially in combination with scalable and (semi)-automated methods such as DNA-based monitoring, helping to obtain data from a broader geographic and temporal range than would be possible by the scientific community alone. Here, we present an overview of the complementarity between community science and DNA-based biomonitoring through examples from ongoing projects. The involvement of hobby experts is particularly crucial for building up the necessary species reference databases that enable DNA-based monitoring. Based on this overview, we identify some key points related to learning opportunities and participant recognition to maximise the success, impact and benefit of community participants in DNA-based monitoring.
