Citizen science powers wetland restoration.

ABSTRACT: Wetlands provide essential ecosystem services, from carbon sequestration and flood mitigation to biodiversity support, yet over 20 % have been lost in recent centuries, prompting global restoration efforts backed by policies like the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Despite rapid expansion of restoration projects, conventional monitoring remains short-term, expert-driven, and often disconnected from site-specific ecological dynamics, limiting adaptive management and long-term success. Citizen science has revolutionized ecological monitoring in other domains by enabling scalable, participatory data collection, but its application to wetland restoration has been largely overlooked. In this Perspective, we assess 120 restoration project sites worldwide and find that citizen science is curr

SUBMITTER: Cui S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12818150 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature