Our coalition-led biodiversity early warning system is growing by a 'bubbling honeypot' model (p. 2 of our pilot project brief). By that, we mean that in our South African model, the system itself became an attractive, dynamic, lively honeypot to which 'bees' from academia, agencies, landowners and other players visited and fed.  In Cascadia, the work takes different shapes in different areas, depending on need, but each pilot project informs the others.  It is growing organically from a small, lean core of pressing needs (identified by users and partners), with partners and collaborators designing and co-producing data, trends, models and products.

​

In times of rapid environmental change and declining government budgets, community/citizen science is a rising engine of biodiversity observation. People are democratically tracking environmental change in space and time, in urban and rural areas.

​

In the model system on which Cascadia's is based, we facilitated community/ citizen science as the core of South Africa's biodiversity early warning system to fill three important aims:

​

• biodiversity data value for money: for every $1 spent by government, roughly $22 was spent by citizen scientists in recreational pursuits.

• building democracy and awareness: by increasing public awareness and passion for biodiversity, and skills in species identification, capture, photography, monitoring, species demography and phenology.

• enabling interdisciplinary growth and innovation: with strong local and international academic interest, new private/public partnerships, better apps, better decisions.

​

The USA and Canada have highly motivated, but often undirected community science energy.  People often yearn to be part of a bigger picture, to channel frustration about environmental degradation or political inertia into productive effort for the common good.

​

Millennials and thirty-somethings are sometimes drawn into community science by smartphone apps like iNaturalist, eBird or Zooniverse, not initially by the science or environmental concern. They may be climbers, cyclists, backcountry or urban foraging geeks. Technology, with them, is the bridge. That's okay.  Whatever it takes, grows awareness, skills, social networks, and physical and mental health.

​

The Cascadia early warning system community is a loose coalition of strategists, scientists, agency and tribal decision-makers, policy wonks, modelers, data geeks, media and film communicators, and community science/'citizen science' groups.

​

We embarked upon a detailed process with our partners to design and prioritize our work, and are refining it adaptively as we go along.