Environmental monitoring is essential for assessing the current state of the environment, measuring
impacts of environmental pressures and providing evidence to government. Recent UK government
announcements have indicated an increased role for ‘Big Society’ in monitoring. In this paper, we
review available literature concerning the use of citizen science for monitoring, present examples of
successful volunteer monitoring work and highlight important issues surrounding the use of volunteers.
We argue that in order to ensure that environmental monitoring continues to be effective it is important
to learn from examples where volunteers are currently used, acknowledging constraints and identifying
potential approaches which will help to maximise both their engagement and data quality. Effective
partnerships between environmental monitoring organisations and volunteers may thus aid the UK in
developing robust coordinated monitoring systems that will be less vulnerable to funding variances
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