6. Conclusion
With the advent of the Internet, citizen science is experiencing an explosion in growth, but it is not impacting conservation decision-making to its full potential. Now is the time to address this issue while we are still in the exploration and development phase of this newly reborn phenomenon. We hypothesized that if citizen science better leverages
the power of place , namely people's affinity for, understanding of, and connection to their home, this will improve the influence of citizen science on conservation decision making. This is especially expected at the local scale where much land-use and management actions are decided. We also expect an increase in the degree to which projects and platforms
leverage place to increase participation, retention, and data utility. There are many ways projects and platforms can leverage the power of place.We used use of place dimensions in project materials as an indicator that projects are leveraging the power of place to assess our hypothesis and found preliminary support. A resulting vision is that we
should make it easier for people who love their home to easily find, create, choose among, and participate in a suite of citizen science projects which are subsequently seamlessly translated into useful data that are easily used by decision-makers affecting a given place through science-based decision making processes. We also provide a variety of specific
recommendations for leveraging the power of place. We are confident these will help, but the relative degree and importance among them is unclear and requires further research. Many of these best practices need further structure, experimentation and evaluation. Towards these ends, we close here by making a call for projects and platforms to better document themselves (especially with regard to the recommendations made herein, as well as their intent and influence
in conservation decision-making) and learn from each other as a community of practice focused on more integrated citizen science.