Helen Verploegen

The current ecological crisis asks for system-wide transformation toward more sustainable views, structures and practices. Recognition and integration of the plural ways people value nature, including intrinsic, instrumental and relational values, is one of the key aspects of this transformative change. To achieve this, diverse societal actors should participate in decision-making processes of environmental policies. We highlight a form of participation that thus far has not been explicitly linked to plural valuation: citizen science. In this perspective, we demonstrate that citizen science–diverse initiatives where citizens participate in knowledge generation processes—is a space where plural values of nature are articulated, practiced and fostered. Based on four values-centered leverage points, we show potential benefits and areas of advance that integrating citizen science in plural valuation offers for required system-wide transformative change. Finally, we provide recommendations toward fully leveraging the potential of citizen science for plural valuation of nature.

Digital technology plays an increasingly important role in wildlife management and conservation, by enhancing monitoring capabilities and reshaping human-wildlife interactions. However, the transformative potential of these digital solutions for coexistence remains unclear. This paper presents a novel framework to assess the transformative potential of digital systems in wildlife management and conservation, focusing on two key factors: Digital Maturity, which evaluates technical sophistication of digital systems, and Systemic Depth, which measures their capacity for enabling lasting change. We used this framework to evaluate 524 studies in a systematic literature review in wildlife management and conservation, and found that although sometimes higher Digital Maturity or Systemic Depth was achieved, overall the transformative potential of applied digital systems was still low. Studies that scored high emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, adaptability, data sharing, and technologies such as machine learning. This research highlights achieving transformative potential requires a holistic approach integrating ecological, social, and technological perspectives.

Over the last years, new media have emerged to share knowledge of and experiences with nature online. Most prominently, participatory digital platforms for observations of flora and fauna. Such platforms are citizen science endeavours, forming databases to be used for science and policy. However, these biodiversity databases are also cultural ventures that tell stories about our human relationships with more-than-humans. In this paper we take a narrative approach to study these relations, employing the narratological term characterization to study how humans and more-than-humans relate to each other in biodiversity databases. This narrative lens provides new insights on how humans and more-than-humans are represented and interact with each other in these databases. By applying this lens to the Dutch observation platform Waarneming.nl and its database of millions of observations, insights emerged around individualization, objectification, and isolation. Human characters are represented as individuals and select or restrict the information that is shared in the database, whereas more-than-human characters are represented as abstracted ‘objects’. Furthermore, more-than- humans are represented in isolation, unrelated to other species in shared images and sounds. This is in contrast with the relational nature of the database in which all observations, more-than-humans, and humans are connected to each other throughout space and time. With an eye to a future where humans and more-than-humans co-exist on more equal foot, we invite biodiversity databases to re-evaluate their representation of humans and more-than-humans by embracing more radical relationality. We propose using more active verbs as ‘encounter’ rather than ‘observation’, providing options to acknowledge both the individual, and make multispecies relationships more visible. By considering such changes, biodiversity databases would do more justice to the affective relations between humans and more-than-humans and advance mutual human-nature relationships.

Online citizen science platforms for nature observations provide valuable data for nature enthusiasts and scientists, but typically emotions and feelings experienced in nature are not shared there. Through focus groups with users of the Dutch citizen science platform Waarneming.nl, we explored how affective nature experiences are shared. We found that citizen scientists exchange affective experiences through face-to-face conversations or social media and hear about others’ experiences through traditional media. Affects are shared to enthuse others to go into nature, respect or connect more with nature, feel recognized and cope with varying affects experienced in response to environmental loss. Yet, these affects are generally not shared on platforms like Waarneming.nl as these media are associated with knowledge production, science and policy, which users perceive to be in opposition to affect. We reflect on this perceived tension between science and affect, suggesting potential ways to overcome this.

A growing group of nature enthusiasts share observations of flora and fauna through participatory online platforms. These ‘citizen science’ data are valuable for research and policy, but the value of these platforms goes beyond this: they provide opportunities to stimulate experiences with nature and remember nature that has been lost. Waarneming.nl is the largest nature observation platform in the Netherlands, with over 70,000 users contributing data on biodiversity through their website and mobile applications. Using Waarneming.nl as an example, the theoretical exploration in this article offers a new lens to look at platforms for nature observations. Users of Waarneming.nl read and write digital traces of encounters with other species, creating a ‘hybrid experience’ of nature, where digital and physical information are intertwined. As physical experiences become scarcer in threatening times of species endangerment and extinction, Waarneming.nl should additionally be understood as a place to memorialize lost nature. By conceptualizing Waarneming.nl as a digital lieu de mémoire (‘place of memories’) and a place where hybrid experiences of nature are inspired, this article reflects on the positive and negative consequences of such platforms for humans and their multispecies relationships.