Center for Community and Citizen Science

This report highlights the breadth and depth of community and citizen science (CCS) contributions to California’s Marine Protected Area (MPA) program priorities and goals as well as participant contributions and outcomes. We examined the CCS efforts of 10 MPA monitoring projects that received baseline and/or long-term funding from the State. They involved 84,000 participants, 476,000 volunteer hours, 528 monitoring sites, and 100 partner organizations, agencies, institutions, and groups. Beyond the 10 baseline and long-term monitoring projects, there are more than 60 additional CCS projects conducting research and monitoring along the California coast. Though demographic data have not been formally collected or reported from these programs, several programs (including two Tribally-led programs) make explicit efforts to engage underrepresented and underserved communities. Though there were more participants in the north and central California coast, the south coast hosted a higher number of monitoring sites within MPAs than the other two bioregions. Some programs overlap within specific MPAs, and participant roles in these programs cover a wide range of different scientific activities throughout the research process. All four pillars of MPA management had some link to the 10 state-funded projects: research and monitoring; education and outreach; enforcement and compliance; and policy and permitting. Our analysis hints at the scale of the public’s desire to participate in science on the California Coast, but also raises the question of what untapped interest and capacity remain, particularly in underrepresented communities. Future work could investigate participant demographics, learning outcomes and other participant benefits, and participant motivations and engagement patterns. There is also potential for greater coordination between project leaders of coastal CCS programs, and desire from participants to see how CCS data are used by managers and policy makers.

Information about human activities along the coast can help us understand human impacts on natural resources and the benefits people derive from marine protected areas (MPAs). In this project we examined human activities along the California coast from 2012 to 2020 using data from the MPA Watch community science network, gathered by more than 1,900 volunteer participants, and a handful of program staff. MPA Watch is gathering useful data at a statewide scale, and has successfully grown its network of volunteer monitoring programs over the last decade to include 12 local programs, 104 monitoring sites, and hundreds of volunteer surveyors each year. Among the observations recorded by MPA Watch surveyors, non-consumptive recreational activities vastly outnumber consumptive activities like fishing, both inside and outside of MPAs. This highlights the value of MPA Watch data for understanding human coastal use, underscores the importance of recreational activities in California’s coastal economy, and reinforces the need to monitor and understand non-consumptive uses in and around MPAs. Our analysis confirms that MPA Watch data can detect broad, statistically robust patterns in human activities along the coast, including among recreational activities that relate to Goal 3 of the Marine Life Protection Act, but have not been the focus of other socioeconomic monitoring projects. MPA Watch data can also be used to detect statistically significant differences between activities inside and outside of MPAs: we used occupancy modeling to investigate the likelihood of occurrence of seven different categories of human activities. From 2012 to 2020 at the statewide level, onshore fishing was less likely inside of MPAs, and tidepooling and recreational boating were more likely inside of MPAs (we found no difference in probability of occurrence for offshore fishing, domestic animals, or onshore or offshore recreation). We conclude with some recommendations for improving MPA Watch data collection protocols, for expanding the use of the data by managers and law enforcement, and for future in-depth analyses that incorporate more of the richness of the dataset