Recommendation 25

We acknowledge that a significant increase in Government-administered monitoring is both staff and resource intensive at a time when there are significant competing demands on public finances. Citizen science data-gathering could play an important role in augmenting and strengthening the monitoring and management of SSSIs and other protected sites. A number of stakeholders reported the critical role that voluntary citizen science does and could play in supplementing monitoring data, if the methodologies used were robust and standardised. We conclude that, if managed effectively, citizen science programmes could make a worthwhile contribution to site and species monitoring efforts. This would serve to both enhance public awareness and engagement in the 30 by 30 initiative and support the delivery of robust datasets.