Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Biodiversity forms the foundation of resilient ecosystems, a stable climate and human well-being. With ongoing urbanization, protecting biodiversity in cities has become increasingly important. Ef-fective monitoring is essential to understand dynamics and the condition of the environment, and to enable informed conservation measures. In this context, citizen science (CS) can provide valuable additional data through observations collected by the public. However, despite its growing popular-ity and the increasing availability of data, it remains unclear to what extent CS data is actually used by city authorities. This study explores whether and how CS data is used in municipal biodiversity management and how it is translated into practical measures. It compares approaches in Sweden and Germany following a comparative qualitative research design. The four selected cities Stockholm, Uppsala, Cologne and Bielefeld were analysed using a document research and semi-structured in-terviews with city representatives. CS is used in all cities for conservation measures, planning deci-sions and raising environmental awareness. In Sweden, CS is strongly institutionalized and inte-grated into everyday practice through the centralized platform Artportalen. By contrast, the CS plat-form landscape in Germany is more fragmented and used in project-based, species-specific contexts often with a stronger emphasis on awareness-raising. Overall, the study suggests, that CS is becom-ing an increasingly important resource for biodiversity governance. At the same time, it remains a complementary data source alongside professional monitoring and always requires careful interpre-tation.