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This chapter explains how citizen science can be used to develop a conservation research program. It describes a specific case in which “super citizen scientists” used manipulative sampling to gather data implicating acid rain and mercury in forest bird declines, highlighting the advantages of partnerships with governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Focusing on the Birds in Forested Landscapes (BFL) project that was originally developed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the chapter demonstrates how citizen data can help address the effects of pollution on birds over wide regions. It also considers the BFL's collaboration with The Nature Conservancy as well as new research using data from another citizen science project, the Breeding Bird Survey, to develop a program for investigating significant conservation issues for birds and for translating science for policy and management.

Palmyra Atoll receives 13 feet of rain because of its location in the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Ancient Polynesians first colonized Palmyra, later it was developed into a copra plantation. Palmyra was used as base in WWII and airstrip construction affected the coral reef circulation. The privately owned island was the site of a double-murder and piracy of a yacht in 1974. A failed rat eradication effort in 2002 further affected the rainforest. Ants and scales killed the largest stands of native Pisonia trees in the Pacific, but the forests started to recover with a second attempt at rat eradication by Island Conservation eradication in 2011 that was successful. Palmyra was purchased by The Nature Conservancy and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. A marine lab is studying climate change in the Palmyra, and now rat-free, Palmyra is planned to be the site of reintroduction of the endangered the Christmas Island Warbler.

We now provide a parsimonious framework for recasting the paradox so that it can be acted on. Our framework of ecosystem management regimes is used in the following chapters to resolve the impasse between ecologists and engineers. In so doing, it integrates engineering more positively into ecosystem management than is currently done. The goal of ecosystem management is a twofold recoupling: where decision makers are managing for reliable ecosystem services, they are also improving the associated ecological functions; and where they are managing for improved ecological functions, they are better ensuring the reliability of ecosystem services associated with those functions. In practice, improvements in ecosystem functions may range from preservation or restoration of self-sustaining processes to the rehabilitation of functions by reintroducing to the ecosystem something like the complexity and unpredictability they once had. The recoupling of functions and services that have been improved varies by the type of management (more formally, the management regime) relied on by decision makers, where the principal task facing the decision maker is to best match the management regime to the ecosystem in question. A “regime” can be thought of as a distinct and coherent way of perceiving, learning, and behaving in terms of variables discussed more frilly below and summarized in table 4.3 at the end of this chapter (for more on policy and ecological regimes in ecosystem management, see Norton 1995, p. 134; Berry et al. 1998; for a discussion of regime theory, see Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986). To summarize our argument, while ecosystems are internally dynamic and complex, they also vary along a gradient in terms of their human population densities, extraction, and other significant features discussed in chapter 3, such as differing models, competing organization, and multiple-use demands. In response to changes along the gradient, ecosystem management passes through thresholds (the most important being limits to learning) as decision makers move from one management regime to another. The thresholds, in fact, are best thought of as gradual transitions between modes and models of learning about ecosystems.