Civic Science in Urban Forestry: An Introduction

Lara A. Roman; Lindsay K. Campbell; Rebecca C. Jordan

doi:10.48044/jauf.2018.004

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Table 1.

Terms related to public participation in the science and management of natural resources.

Term	Definition
Citizen science	“[P]artnerships between scientists and non-scientists in which authentic data are collected, shared, and analyzed” (Jordan et al. 2012), while in the ecological sciences, a citizen scientist is sometimes considered “a volunteer who collects and/or processes data as part of a scientific enquiry” (Silvertown 2009).
Civic ecology	“[A] field of interdisciplinary study concerned with individual, community, and environmental outcomes of community-based environmental stewardship practices, and the interactions of such practices with people and other organisms, communities, governance institutions, and the ecosystems in which those practices take place” and “civic ecology practices are self-organizing stewardship initiatives, often taking place in cities” (Krasny and Tidball 2012).
Civic science	“Civic science alludes to a changing relationship between science, expert knowledge and citizens in democratic societies. In this perspective, citizens and the public have a state in the science-politics interface, which can no longer be viewed as an exclusive domain for scientific experts and policy-makers only,” with dimensions of civic science emphasizing public participation, enhancing representation of marginalized voices, and democratization of the scientific process (Bäckstrand 2003).
Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)	“[A] mechanism to address both environmental and socio-economic goals and to balance the exploitation and conservation of valued ecosystem components”, which “requires some degree of devolution of decision-making power and authority over natural resources to communities and community-based organizations” (Armitage 2005, and citations therein).
Community-based participatory research (CBPR)	“[A] collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change to improve community health and eliminate health disparities” (Kellogg 2001, qtd. in Minkler and Wallerstein 2008).
Co-management	“[T]he sharing of power and responsibility between the government and local resource users” (Berkes 2009).
Crowdsourcing	“[T]he practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid” (OED 2017), either via the internet, or in ecology and conservation, crowdsourcing can also involve field data (Dickinson et al. 2010).
Knowledge co-production	“[T]he collaborative process of bringing a plurality of knowledge sources and types together to address a defined problem and build an integrated or systems-oriented understanding of that problem” (Armitage et al. 2011), typically related to co-management of natural resources.