Spot, log, map: assessing a marine virtual citizen science program against Reed's best practice for stakeholder participation in environmental management

Citizen science has seen a recent burgeoning of interest, public involvement and diversity of programs developed for participation (Thiel et al., 2014; Follett and Strezov, 2015; Silvertown, 2009). It has become progressively important, both for its ability to engage volunteers to assist in generating observations at scales or resolutions impossible to attain by individual researchers, but also in enabling a coupling between natural and human approaches. Citizen science builds the capacity for researchers to access local knowledge and implement conservation projects that might be impossible otherwise (Kobori et al., 2016).