Developing the global potential of citizen science: Assessing opportunities that benefit people, society and the environment in East Africa

1. Citizen science is gaining increasing prominence as a tool for science and engage-ment. However, despite being a potentially valuable tool for sustainable development, citizen science has little visibility in many developing countries. 2. We undertook a collaborative prioritisation process with experts in conservation and the environment to assess the potential of environmental citizen science in East Africa, including its opportunities, benefits and barriers. This provided principles that are applicable across developing countries, particularly for large-scale citizen science. 3. We found that there was great potential for citizen science to add to our scientific knowledge of natural resources and biodiversity trends. Many the important benefits of citizen science were for people, as the environment directly.


| INTRODUC TI ON
The world is increasingly facing rapid and dramatic change with the loss of habitats and species, and alteration of ecosystems, with detrimental impacts on people. Concern about this is highlighted through international treaties. For example, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) seek to increase human wellbeing while ensuring environmental sustainability (UNGA, 2015). The Convention on biological diversity's Aichi biodiversity targets sought to reduce biodiversity loss with benefits for people (SCBD, 2010). It is vital to make progress towards these goals, and to assess progress.
Citizen science is the involvement of people in the scientific process, including participating in environmental recording and monitoring. It has a twofold role to play in supporting international agreements. First, an outcome of good citizen science is scientifically robust data, useful for environmental monitoring and assessing progress towards environment targets (Chandler et al., 2017;Danielsen et al., 2014). Second, the citizen science activity itself can be valuable for individuals and society (and their interactions with the environment) because undertaking, and participating in citizen science can increase social capital, support awareness raising, empower individuals and communities and inspire action (McKinley et al., 2015;Pretty & Smith, 2004;West & Pateman, 2017).

| Citizen science beyond the "western world"
Citizen science includes a diversity of approaches, but it is useful to distinguish between contributory approaches, in which people engage with activities designed by professionals, and collaborative approaches (also called participatory or community-based monitoring), in which potential participants are involved in defining the scope, purpose and methodology (Bonney, Ballard, et al., 2009;Danielsen, Burgess, & Balmford, 2005). Recent surveys have reported that the majority of environmental citizen science is "contributory" and most prevalent in North America, Europe and Australia (Bonney et al., 2014;Chandler et al., 2017;Pocock, Tweddle, Savage, Robinson, & Roy, 2017;Theobald et al., 2015). Currently, there is relatively little visibility of activities in developing countries, but they do occur: there are both contributory projects (e.g. recording plants in southern Africa; Sustainable Development Goals. In developing countries, innovation is needed to further develop culturally relevant citizen science that benefits participants and end users. This should be supported through regional networks of stakeholders for sharing best practice. We defined "fruitful" as "achievable, useful and likely to be successful, considering current and new activities". Hulbert, 2016), and participatory monitoring projects (such as reviewed by Danielsen et al., 2005;Chandler et al., 2017). There are also activities with international reach that are: field-based, for example, iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/), eBird (https://www.ebird. org), iSpot (https://www.ispotnature.org/) and the EarthEcho Water Challenge (http://www.monitorwater.org/); and online, for example, identification of mammal species from camera traps (Swanson et al., 2015).

| Collaborative prioritisation of the potential of citizen science in East Africa
Here, we undertook a systematic assessment of the potential for citizen science in East Africa; the first such assessment outside of developed countries. In June 2016, we held a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, entitled "Unlocking Africa's potential for citizen science" for 49 delegates from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (Appendix S1). Following this, 22 people (Appendix S2) participated in a 1day workshop. The workshop participants (authors of this paper) are experts in conservation and natural resource management and were drawn from government, non-governmental organisations and research organisations/academia in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (henceforth termed "East Africa"). Therefore, they mainly (but not exclusively) represented institutional users of environmental data and tended to consider large-scale (e.g. "contributory") citizen science activities, but some also had practical experience working with communities for environmental monitoring. Our objectives were to identify and prioritise the (a) opportunities for, (b) benefits of and (c) barriers to citizen science and to show how these are related to policies for sustainable development (Table 1).
The remit of this assessment was all East Africa, the whole environment (air, land and water, as well as biodiversity), and with emphasis on outcomes within 5 years. We used a collaborative prioritisation approach, which is useful for collating expert opinions (Sutherland, Fleishman, Mascia, Pretty, & Rudd, 2011) and ranking issues (Pocock et al., 2015).
Our workshop had two parts. First, we identified the key opportunities, benefits and barriers for citizen science in East Africa. We undertook initial consultation with conference attendees, and then refined the lists and their wording through discussion at the workshop TA B L E 2 Opportunities for citizen science in ecology and the environment in East Africa as ranked at a collaborative prioritisation workshop, and the targets they support ( Table 1). Second, we used anonymous voting to rank these opportunities, benefits and barriers to support future decision-making about citizen science. The overall ranks were unanimously accepted at the workshop. After the workshop, we classified items on each list according to their policy context (Table 1) considering Aichi biodiversity targets (SCBD, 2010) and the DPSIR (Drivers, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses) framework (Smeets & Weterings, 1999).

| The opportunities for citizen science
We identified 15 specific opportunities for citizen science in East Africa (Table 2) including subjects for which there were already successful citizen science projects in the region (e.g. distribution mapping of birds and mammals) and novel subjects (e.g. natural resource mapping). These would help assess progress towards 11 of 20 of the Aichi biodiversity targets (Appendix S3). We concluded that the most fruitful opportunities for developing large-scale citizen science in East Africa over the next few years would be monitoring habitats, species and freshwater. This would provide valuable information on environmental States (including natural capital assessment, mapping of natural resources and species), thus supporting conservation assessments.
By collecting data across time or space, citizen science could also provide information on Impacts, that is, measures of change due to pressures (Table 2; Figure 1; Danielsen et al., 2014). Specific activities could also assess Pressures (e.g. utilisation of natural resources or pollution). Other relevant opportunities for citizen science, that is, human health and disaster relief, were outside of our remit.

| The benefits from citizen science
Our top-ranked benefits of citizen science in East Africa were a mix of social benefits, that is, increasing people's awareness and empowering young people (see also Conrad & Hilchey, 2011) and the provision of data, which can lead to better and more effective action (Table 3). This means that citizen science could have most influence on the societal responses to, and the drivers of, environmental change ( Figure 1; Table 3), thus supporting the UN SDGs and Aichi biodiversity targets to "mainstream biodiversity". We identified many different beneficiaries of citizen science: including participants in citizen science, communities, decision makers and data users. We concluded that these beneficiaries were inter-dependent, and should all be included in the design and delivery of citizen science, rather than being involved independently. This would ensure the design and delivery of citizen science is collaborative rather than "top down".

| The barriers to the increased use of citizen science
The current barriers to citizen science that we ranked highly were mostly about people and institutions, so requiring social solutions, rather than concerns of data quality or coverage (Table 4).
Institutional-level barriers (e.g. organisational capacity, perceived value of data and staff member's awareness of opportunities for citizen science) were regarded as especially fruitful to resolve, although this could have been influenced by institutional backgrounds of the workshop participants. Some additional barriers ("structural": access F I G U R E 1 The opportunities and benefits of environmental citizen science could support knowledge and action across the DPSIR causal framework of interactions between people and the environment, in line with international goals, as established through our workshop on citizen science in East Africa. Icons: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: copyright UNIC; Aichi biodiversity target icons: used with permission, copyright BIP/SCBD to technology, uneven spatial distribution of participants, literacy of participants and language barriers) could be tackled with appropriate project design.

| RECOMMENDATIONS FOR RE ALIS ING THE P OTENTIAL OF CITIZEN SCIEN CE IN DE VELOPING COUNTRIE S
Our findings were directly applicable to East Africa, but have relevance elsewhere. We make three recommendations for citizen science in developing countries, in addition to existing principles for best practice in citizen science (e.g. Bonney, Ballard, et al., 2009;Bonney, Cooper, et al., 2009;Tweddle, Robinson, Pocock, & Roy, 2012;ECSA, 2015).

| Develop projects for the needs of multiple stakeholders
We concluded that citizen science has many different beneficiaries (Table 3), and so recommend that funders, data users, policymakers, communities and participants should all be involved in the development of projects. This will ensure that the data are useable

| Develop projects that are locally relevant
One of our key findings was that the barriers to and benefits of citizen science were predominantly social. This emphasises that each citizen science activity takes place within a specific social context (e.g. cultural and technological), which must be considered for activities to be successful (Conrad & Hilchey, 2011;Loos et al., 2015). Context will vary across the world: there is a culture of contributory citizen science in western countries as "serious leisure" volunteering for personal enjoyment and to "help nature" (Haklay, 2013; reviews in Geoghegan, Dyke, Pateman, West, & Everett, 2016), but attitudes towards "volunteering" TA B L E 3 Benefits of citizen science in ecology and the environment in East Africa as ranked at a collaborative prioritisation workshop, and the targets that they support Description of categories as in Table 2. vary culturally (Hacker, Picken, & Lewis, 2017). We (and others, including Danielsen et al., 2005) concluded that focusing on action towards solutions to environmental and societal problems could be especially important in developing countries. Access to technology, especially smartphones, facilitates participation in citizen science (Newman et al., 2012;Pocock et al., 2017)

| Establish networks to share, collaborate and act strategically
Evaluation of our citizen science conference in East Africa (TBA, 2016) showed the benefits of this opportunity to interact with other practitioners. We recommend governments and NGOs fund regional networks of citizen science stakeholders (see Vogel, Bowser, & Brocklehurst, 2017; http://citizenscience.asia/). These should not only include funders and data users for greatest strategic impact, but also ensure that participants' values and motivations are represented. Such networks should link with each other internationally for two-way learning in innovation and evaluation.

| CON CLUS IONS
Our study shows that citizen science has great potential in East Africa, which is indicative of the global potential for citizen TA B L E 4 Barriers to citizen science in ecology and the environment in East Africa as ranked at a collaborative prioritisation workshop, and the type and target of solutions for these barriers science (Pocock, Chandler, et al., 2018). Sustained investment and commitment should be made available to overcome important social barriers (especially for institutions), to develop locally relevant approaches (including participatory approaches based around the needs of participants, not just institutions) and to support networks of practitioners. This will help the opportunities we identified to provide great benefits to nature, people and society.

ACK N OWLED G EM ENTS
The led the writing of the manuscript. All other authors contributed to the drafts and gave final approval for publication.