4.2.1. Include ecological interconnections of place
One way to leverage place is to enable people with a great affection and understanding of place to participate in citizen science. The way that projects or platforms are designed affects how local knowledge and expertise is engaged. In some cases, local or traditional ecological experts may hold unique, long term, intimate knowledge about the social and ecological landscape of a place that can be somewhat dissimilar from environmental indicators that data scientists or observing systems often measure (see Punawai et al., 2016). Often the knowledge of local and traditional experts is less about specific variables within a local environment and more about entire landscape systems. Yet, many citizen science project and platform designs focus on a particular issue or taxa. Platforms and protocols that allow for greater breadth of “data” collection are needed to capitalize on local knowledge (see CitSci.org as one
example; Newman et al., 2011). MentalModeler.org (Gray et al., 2013)is another example that partially addresses this issue by allowing local experts to share their understandings of the complex interactions of a place as conceptual models in a systematic and structured format that can be folded into the scientific process for hypothesis development, scenario exploration, and in co-identifying needs and issues (e.g., recommendations 4.1.1 and 4.1.2).