Participatory monitoring

Participatory monitoring (also known as collaborative monitoring, community-based monitoring, locally based monitoring or volunteer monitoring) is the regular collection of measurements or other kinds of data (monitoring), usually of natural resources and biodiversity, undertaken by local people who live in the area being monitored, who rely on local natural resources, and consequently have great local knowledge of those resources. The people involved usually live in communities with considerable social cohesion where they regularly work together on shared projects.

Participatory monitoring has emerged as an alternative or addition to professional scientist-executed monitoring. Scientist-executed monitoring is often costly and hard to sustain, especially in those regions of the world where financial resources are limited. Moreover, scientist-executed monitoring can be logistically and technically difficult and is often perceived to be irrelevant by resource managers and the local communities. Involving local people and their communities in monitoring is often part of the process of sharing the management of land and resources with the local communities. It is connected to the devolution of rights and power to the locals. Aside from potentially providing high-quality information, participatory monitoring can raise local awareness and build the community and local government expertise that is needed for addressing the management of natural resources.

Participatory monitoring is sometimes included in terms such as citizen science,crowd-sourcing, ‘public participation in scientific research’ and participatory action research.

The term ‘participatory monitoring’ embraces a broad range of approaches, from self-monitoring of harvests by local resource users themselves, to censuses by local rangers, and inventories by amateur naturalists. The term includes techniques labelled as ‘self-monitoring’, ranger-based monitoring’, ‘event-monitoring’, ‘participatory assessment, monitoring and evaluation of biodiversity’, ‘community-based observing’, and ‘community-based monitoring and information systems’.

Many of these approaches are directly linked to resource management, but the entities being monitored vary widely, from individual animals and plants, through habitats, to ecosystem goods and services. However, all of the approaches have in common that the monitoring is carried out by individuals who live in the monitored places and rely on local natural resources, and that local people or local government staff are directly involved in formulation of research questions, data collection, and (in most instances) data analysis, and implementation of management solutions based on research findings.

...
Wikipedia