Contributions of citizen science to landscape democracy: potentials and challenges of current approaches

Abstract

For landscape research to function in a democratic landscape governance, it must achieve two things. One, it must integrate stakeholder perspectives at multiple steps of the research process, and two, it must effectively communicate its knowledge and insights. Citizen science can be described as the involvement of the public in the scientific process, through a range of different approaches. We ask what such approaches can bring the landscape research and its stakeholders closer together. We survey the field of citizen science and present a number of typologies of approaches. Next, we introduce three applications of citizen science in the landscape context and examine them under the lens of the typologies. We find that each case employs citizen science to include stakeholders in different ways, but each of them limited to just one stage of the research process. Finally, we suggest ways forward for landscape research to achieve an integrative relationship between researchers and stakeholders.

Keywords:

• Citizen science
• landscape democracy
• social-ecological systems
• landscape
• landscape governance