Department of Ecology, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Department of Environmental and Natural Resources Management, University of Patras, Agrinio, Greece.
Sci Rep. 2017 Aug 21;7(1):8873. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-09316-9.
EU biodiversity conservation policy is based on the Habitats Directive (92/43/EC), which aims that habitat types and species of Community interest should reach 'favourable conservation status'. To this end, Member States are obliged to perform periodic assessment of species and habitat conservation status through biodiversity monitoring, which, in almost all cases, was performed by experts implementing standardized field protocols. Here, we examine the quality of data collected in the field by non-experts (citizen scientists) for the conservation status assessment of habitat types, and specifically for the criteria 'typical species', 'specific structures and functions', and 'pressures and threats'. This task is complicated and demands different types of field data. We visited two Natura 2000 sites and investigated four habitat types (two in each site) with non-experts and compared their data to the data collected by experts for accuracy, completeness and spatial arrangement. The majority of the non-expert data were accurate (i.e. non-experts recorded information they observed in the field), but they were incomplete (i.e. non-experts detected less information than the experts). Also, non-experts chose their sampling locations closer to the edge of the habitat, i.e. in more marginal conditions and thus in potentially more degraded conditions, than experts.
欧盟的生物多样性保护政策基于《栖息地指令》（92/43/EC），旨在实现“有利的保护状态”，即具有社区利益的生境类型和物种。为此，成员国必须通过生物多样性监测对物种和生境保护状况进行定期评估，而在几乎所有情况下，这都是由实施标准化实地规程的专家来完成的。在这里，我们研究了非专家（公民科学家）在生境类型保护状况评估中收集的实地数据的质量，特别是在“典型物种”、“特定结构和功能”以及“压力和威胁”这三个标准方面的数据质量。这项任务很复杂，需要不同类型的实地数据。我们访问了两个 Natura 2000 站点，并与非专家一起调查了四个生境类型（每个站点两个），并将他们的数据与专家收集的数据进行了准确性、完整性和空间分布的比较。大多数非专家数据是准确的（即非专家记录了他们在实地观察到的信息），但不完整（即非专家检测到的信息比专家少）。此外，非专家选择的采样地点比专家更靠近生境的边缘，即在更边缘的条件下，因此可能处于更退化的条件下。
