Citizen Science Can Benefit Wetland Restoration

“We encourage people that don’t have an ecological background to join in citizen science because it can greatly expand the scale and coverage of data collection,” said Shihao Cui, a Postdoctoral Researcher working on wetland restoration at Aarhus University, Denmark.

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A group of around 20 students congregated in the Danish national park Lille Vildmose in late 2024. They were looking for signs of how the wetlands there might have changed since measures were implemented to restore them. Although enriching, the trip was rather brief – and that is part of the problem with wetland restoration projects.

“There’s currently a fundamental mismatch between ecological dynamics and expert-led monitoring systems. They’re not enough for the evaluation of restoration projects,” said Shihao Cui, a Postdoctoral Researcher working on wetland restoration at Aarhus University, Denmark, who took the students on their expedition.

“Wetlands are ecosystems that develop over long timescales and follow non-linear trajectories,” said Cui. What that means is that, unlike a tree that grows at a steady, predictable pace over time, a wetland’s development fluctuates wildly in the short term, making its long-term progress visible only when looking at a large collection of data over an extended period.

Cui, whose research is part of the European Union-funded WET HORIZONS project developing new tools and methods for rapid large-scale wetland restoration, recently published a paper detailing the key role that citizen scientists could play in filling in the gaps in monitoring wetlands. The paper was written in collaboration with researchers from another EU-funded project, which is investigating how wetlands can be used to mitigate the impact of droughts.

Where the students are training to be professionals, citizen scientists are members of the general public without formal training. “We encourage people that don’t have an ecological background to join in citizen science because it can greatly expand the scale and coverage of data collection,” said Cui.

Peatlands, a specific type of wetland where the soil is made of partially-decayed plant material, are unique ecosystems home to many rare and threatened species found nowhere else. The world’s peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests, despite peatlands covering just around 3% of the Earth’s surface. Similarly, peatlands can help reduce flooding. Ensuring that restoration projects are running as intended is key to protecting these vital ecosystems. 

Visitors to the Lille Vildmose national park may now find something unexpected among the plant, animal, and insect life: a QR code. They can scan the code and upload their own observations of wetlands, such as how high the water levels are or what kind of vegetation they see, to the WET HORIZONS database. “People can go into these sites and try to help measure several indicators in the field,” said Cui.

The relevance of citizen scientists in monitoring nature has become more widely recognized in recent years. In the EU, for example, the Nature Restoration Law – an ambitious piece of environmental legislation aiming to reverse the loss of natural ecosystems – encourages member states to promote citizen science in ecological monitoring and to allocate adequate resources for it. Similarly, the proportion of environmental impact statements in the US that referenced or incorporated citizen science increased from 3% in 2012 to 40% in 2022.

A growing number of citizen science networks – like the European Citizen Science Association, the Australian Citizen Science Association, and the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences in the United States – now offer support to people who are interested in becoming more involved with research through citizen science, providing guidance, methodological advice, and peer support, among other things.

Engaging people to become citizen scientists is an important part of getting them to collaborate in the monitoring work. While the ubiquity of mobile phones, apps, and QR codes can make citizen science more accessible to the masses, Cui’s paper argues that long-term engagement from citizen scientists will come from appealing to their personal values and wish to connect to nature as well as their desire to contribute to science and policy. 

Many citizen science initiatives are also “deeply place-based,” the paper continues, “driven by long-standing commitments to the care and stewardship of local landscapes.” It argues that recognizing and supporting these motivations “can help sustain participation over long restoration timelines.”

One way of doing so is framing the work as mutually beneficial. Citizens likely to be visiting these spaces regularly would gain more insight into what’s happening in the local area they care about. “Citizen scientists can provide observations in wetland restoration, and it also can help them to gain a deeper understanding of the research project,” said Cui.

Wetland restoration is part of the European Commission’s biodiversity strategy. Currently, only 10% of Europe’s peatlands are in good condition. The Nature Restoration Law, which came into force in 2024, has binding restoration targets for all ecosystems, including peatlands. By 2030, those targets should cover 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas.

Despite being incredibly helpful, citizen science alone cannot fulfil these targets. Bottom-up participation in science can provide observations that would otherwise be difficult or expensive to obtain, but it must be paired with work from policymakers, funding bodies, and restoration agencies to ensure that the data collected by citizen scientists is properly implemented into the restoration strategies.