The species was first documented in Europe on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania in 2007, and an early Polish record was reported before 2011. Interview participants described collecting it in northern Poland in the late 1980s, but that claim is not supported by long-term monitoring of the region’s mycobiota. The researchers therefore treated 2007 as a potential starting point for the species’ expansion in Poland. Since then, its documented range has extended more than 600 km inland and encompasses almost all 16 Polish voivodships. The cumulative number of reports rose rapidly and was represented by both exponential and curvilinear functions, a pattern the authors interpret as consistent with an invasion curve moving from establishment into rapid expansion.

Most survey records came from Pomorskie, a Baltic coastal region containing the site of Poland’s earliest known occurrence near Sasino. In 205 of 274 cases, respondents said they had gathered the fungus there. Only 53% of the people collecting it in Pomorskie lived in that region; others were visitors who had travelled specifically to collect the species or tourists who encountered it while on holiday. The fungus is associated in Poland with pine woods containing heather. These concentrations of collecting activity at a major source area have turned A. projectellus into an ingredient of foraging tourism, in which visitors travel to known mushroom sites and gather the fungi themselves.

Following its initial discovery in Poland, the bolete was collected almost exclusively along the coast, but the distance between the original locality and later collection sites increased over time. Until 2016, all observations were confined to Pomorskie except for a single inland record in 2012. From 2017 onward, it began appearing at locations progressively farther from the Baltic source, particularly in southeastern Poland. The year 2023 produced the highest number of records, with increases in northern, central and southern Poland, including sites more than 500 km from the original introduction area. Because the cumulative curve had not plateaued, the authors considered the range to be still expanding. The curve describes reported occurrences, however, and is not a direct measurement of population size or abundance.

The questionnaire added 56 new Polish localities across 28 counties where the species had not previously been reported, with the new sites concentrated especially in southeastern Poland. A notable cluster occurred in the sandy lowlands of Podkarpackie, north and northeast of Rzeszów, where extensive pine forests are present. Some collectors in the region reported travelling between Lublin and Rzeszów to gather the fungus, and it was being sold at Rzeszów’s main vegetable market. Additional localities were reported around Warsaw, where pine forests coexist with a large population, and in Lubuskie, north of Lower Silesia. The species was not collected in southwestern Poland during the survey, and no records were reported from Podlaskie.

A. projectellus has also entered Polish food culture, and the researchers recorded 52 local names, 26 of which were used by at least two people. Names such as borowik amerykański, translated as “American bolete,” referred to the fungus’s geographic origin, while borowik wrzosowy, or “heather bolete,” described the heather-rich pine habitat in which it grows in Poland. Other commonly used names included amerykaniec, borowik wysmukły, amerykanin, złotak and złotoborowik wysmukły. Interview participants and mushroom collectors posting in social-media forums described the mushroom as tasty, fragrant and firm in texture. It was used similarly to other boletes, including in sauces, soups and pickles, and it was also dried for later use. Its culinary use had expanded to include Christmas Eve meals.

Preservation practices varied among the 269 respondents who answered the relevant question meaningfully. Drying and freezing were each reported by 61%, pickling by 44%, and consumption of fresh mushrooms after processing by 26%. Only one respondent mentioned salting for lacto-fermentation. The authors identify several features that may have helped the unfamiliar fungus gain acceptance. Its sponge-like undersurface places it within a group that Polish mushroom education commonly treats as relatively safe, while it lacks the bitterness that can make similar boletes undesirable. Its colour also resembles that of several popular edible species, including Boletus edulis, Suillus species, Imleria badia and Xerocomellus species. Once experienced mushroom pickers established that it was edible, the researchers suggest, it was quickly incorporated into a familiar folk grouping of edible boletes.

The research combined occurrence information from the literature, herbaria, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the researchers’ own field survey with active ethnomycological data collection. The researchers reduced spatial duplication by removing multiple species records within the same grid cell, retaining 325 occurrence records from 447 locations. The questionnaire and interviews then connected geographic occurrences with collectors’ origins, travel, local names, culinary practices and preservation methods. This active approach also gathered cultural information that was not available in the standard open-access occurrence repositories. Awareness of the mushroom’s exotic status was widespread among online respondents: 80% knew that the species was new and potentially invasive, whereas 19% did not.

The survey did not find a significant relationship between collectors’ place of origin and the number of records in a given region. Spearman’s rank correlation was −0.08, with p = 0.76, after Pomorskie was excluded because collectors deliberately travelled to that region. Some respondents from Śląskie and Dolnośląskie had collected the fungus in northern Poland, yet few localities were known in those regions. Conversely, numerous reports came from Podkarpackie, where the researchers encountered no people who had collected the fungus in northern Poland. These patterns provide no evidence that mushroom collectors were an important dispersal vector, although the study does not exclude their contribution alongside other mechanisms. Wind or animal vectors may be more influential, but the survey did not test those possibilities directly.

The ecological significance of the expansion remains uncertain because available data do not yet demonstrate whether A. projectellus harms native fungal communities. Under the strict IUCN definition, which requires a proven negative effect on native biota, the authors consider it better described for now as exotic rather than invasive. European Union rules also classify it as a novel food because it was not consumed in the union before 1997, complicating its legal marketing even though its sale was observed in Rzeszów. The researchers argue that decisions about promoting its edibility should depend on studies of its effects on native mycobiota, while the present evidence supports continued monitoring of its spread and use across Europe. The immediate picture is that a North American mushroom first documented in Europe in 2007 has become widely collected, named, eaten and reported across much of Poland, although both the causes of its inland spread and its ecological consequences remain unresolved.

Subject of Research: Citizen-science mapping of the spread, collection and culinary use of Aureoboletus projectellus in Poland

Article Title: Does a citizen science project describe the biogeography of exotic Aureoboletus projectellus in Poland? An ethnomycological survey

Article References: Pietras, M., Robak, D., Terlecka, M., & Łuczaj, Ł. (2025). Does a citizen science project describe the biogeography of exotic Aureoboletus projectellus in Poland? An ethnomycological survey. IMA Fungus, 16, Article e166407. https://doi.org/10.3897/imafungus.16.166407

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/imafungus.16.166407

Keywords: Aureoboletus projectellus, citizen science, Poland, fungal biogeography, ethnomycology, mushroom foraging, bolete mushrooms, fungal dispersal, invasive fungi, Polish cuisine, Does, citizen

Chlorophorus annularis is a longhorn beetle in the family Cerambycidae, a group of more than 40,000 described species that feed on plants, wood or decaying plant material. It originates in temperate and subtropical parts of Southeast Asia and has been introduced far beyond its native range. The beetle has been intercepted in North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Australasia and Europe. Its principal economic importance comes from bamboo, which it damages and contaminates as a product. Outside Asia, reported hosts span 14 plant families, but bamboo is the material most closely associated with the pest and the usual source of international transport.

Until now, the European evidence for the species consisted largely of isolated individuals linked to imported bamboo products such as furniture, poles, brooms and decorative sticks. That pattern supported the prevailing view that the beetle was repeatedly arriving in trade shipments without becoming established. Yet a sequence of encounters without an obvious connection to imported material—including beetles found alive in a car, a house and a German garden—raises a different possibility. The new records strengthen the case that the species may be settling into European landscapes rather than merely passing through them.

The Belgian finds were especially notable. A living specimen was discovered in a car in Genk on 31 July 2019, but investigators could not associate it with a host plant. A second beetle emerged inside a house in Torhout on 30 December 2020, again without an apparent link to bamboo or another host. Both animals were identified by Belgian experts and deposited with the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The Netherlands also joined the distribution map when a living beetle was found beneath a pile of bamboo sticks purchased from a garden centre in Wageningen on 18 August 2011 and reported through the Dutch observation platform waarneming.nl.

Citizen-science platforms supplied most of the new information. Researchers searched iNaturalist, the British iRecord system, the Czech Entomologické Fórum and waarneming.nl for records of C. annularis, then checked observations of related Chlorophorus species to reduce the risk of confusing it with similar beetles. Social media groups also proved valuable, allowing images and specimens to be circulated to naturalists and professional entomologists for identification. This combination of broad public participation and specialist review transformed isolated encounters into a continent-scale monitoring effort without requiring a large conventional field-survey team.

Some of the most striking evidence came from imported bamboo that was already in use. In Obříství, Czech Republic, residents found adults and larvae in broken bamboo poles between 2016 and 2018, while other beetle families were present in the same material. Seven adults emerged from Vietnamese bamboo sticks in Hesselager, Denmark, in 2016. In France, multiple beetles hatched from an Indonesian bamboo bed in 2008, leaving visible exit holes, and another emerged from a bamboo broomstick in 2014 at a workshop in Le Crès. These observations demonstrate that imported material can function as a concealed nursery, allowing beetles to develop indoors before adults emerge and disperse.

The recent UK records point to the same risk from goods stored away from their original import route. A beetle found alive in Braintree in 2018 was suspected to have come from bamboo sold by a horticultural supplier. Another was photographed on a window at the Think Tank in Lincoln in 2019, most likely after emerging from bamboo sticks stored in an office. A third appeared in a garage in Stirchley in 2020, where bamboo was kept. The first Danish occurrence in Hesselager, the first Dutch occurrence in Wageningen and the first Belgian records all add locations to a pattern in which the insect can be encountered far from ports, airports and inspection facilities.

Perhaps the clearest indication of a changing status came from Hamburg, where a beetle was found alive on a wooden fence near a 15-year-old ornamental bamboo plant on 23 August 2020. Unlike most European records, the animal was not associated with a recently imported commodity. It was the city’s third record and its first in 55 years, indicating how rarely the species has been encountered. The Belgian examples lack a host connection, while the Hamburg beetle was found beside live bamboo. Together, these observations cannot establish that a breeding population has formed, but they weaken the assumption that every European occurrence is a transient import and are consistent with possible local establishment.

The researchers caution that the true number of imported and established beetles is probably underestimated. The species resembles several native European longhorn beetles, so a small individual may be overlooked, misidentified or dismissed without careful examination. Official controls at harbors and airports, together with international standards for imported products and wood packaging, cannot eliminate every accidental introduction. Some shipments are detected only years after arrival, giving the species time to establish. The absence of records from Portugal, Ireland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian Peninsula, the Balkans and parts of central and eastern Europe should therefore not be read as proof that the beetle is absent; the bamboo trade makes introductions plausible across much of the continent.

Climate change may further complicate the outlook. If host plants are available and conditions become more suitable, southern European cities could provide favorable environments for establishment. Existing reports in Sicily and in the Hérault and Var departments of southern France therefore warrant additional attention. The authors propose directing public reporting toward designated non-native species, then routinely extracting and reviewing flagged records from platforms such as iNaturalist and iRecord. This would combine high-density observation with taxonomic verification, potentially turning citizen science into an early-warning system. The bamboo borer’s newly expanded European record shows that such systems can detect ecological change that conventional inspection alone may miss.

Subject of Research: Citizen-science documentation of the Asian bamboo borer’s expanding European distribution

Article Title: Citizen scientists significantly improve our knowledge on the non-native longhorn beetle Chlorophorus annularis (Fabricius, 1787) ( Coleoptera , Cerambycidae ) in Europe

Article References: Seidel, M., Lüttke, M., Cocquempot, C., Potts, K., Heeney, W. J., & Husemann, M. (2021). Citizen scientists significantly improve our knowledge on the non-native longhorn beetle Chlorophorus annularis (Fabricius, 1787) (Coleoptera, Cerambycidae) in Europe. BioRisk, 16, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3897/biorisk.16.61099

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/biorisk.16.61099

Keywords: Citizen science, Asian bamboo borer, Chlorophorus annularis, Biological invasions, Insect monitoring, Europe, iNaturalist, Bamboo pests, Longhorn beetles, Non-native species, Citizen, scientists

The findings matter because both species are thermophilic, meaning they thrive in warm conditions, and both are now appearing far north of their known ranges. M. paykullii is native to the Afrotropical region, including Egypt, the Sahara, and Mauritania, and until recently its only Mediterranean record was a pair of males documented in Portugal in 2014. A. spallanzania, once confined to the Western Alps, has been spreading rapidly across the Mediterranean and beyond. The new records show A. spallanzania reaching Slovakia, Romania, and Luxembourg as recently as 2024, while M. paykullii was first photographed in Cyprus in 2019, in Türkiye in 2021, and in Spain in 2022.

The identification process relied on established morphological criteria for European mantises, with the researchers cross-checking each record against photographs of potentially confusable species to prevent misidentification. When observers were reachable, the team requested exact coordinates and original images. In one particularly valuable case, a single female M. paykullii collected from a building adjacent to an artificial garden in the Muratpaşa district of Antalya, Türkiye, was sent to the authors for confirmation. After being transferred to captivity, the female laid an ootheca, the foam-encased egg mass characteristic of mantises, from which 21 first-instar nymphs emerged. The adult, the ootheca, and the nymphs were preserved in 96% alcohol for future morphological and molecular work.

Strikingly, every single specimen of both species was observed in anthropogenic areas: parks, parking lots, hotel gardens, apartment balconies, building walls, picnic tables, and the landscaped vegetation at the gate of Larnaca Airport in Cyprus. Two adult females were photographed on the landscape plantings at the airport gate in August 2023, and the observer reported seeing numerous additional nymphs and adults at the same site. In Salobreña, Spain, an adult female and a male nymph were recorded in October 2022 in an area surrounded by agricultural fields and buildings. In İskenderun, Hatay, an adult female turned up inside a house at night. The pattern is consistent: these mantises are not dispersing through natural habitats but through the human-built landscape.

This urban association supports the hypothesis that human activities, particularly transportation and landscaping, are driving the spread. For A. spallanzania, previous research has implicated railway networks in its dispersal across the Mediterranean, and the species is considered sedentary and habitat-specific, making natural long-distance migration unlikely. Females have shorter wings and more limited movement than males, and new populations can only establish through oothecae laid by fertilized females. The fact that most new records cluster near human settlements strongly suggests that oothecae or individuals are being moved inadvertently with plants, soil, vehicles, or cargo.

The Turkish record of A. spallanzania adds an intriguing biogeographic detail. The specimen, an adult female photographed in a garden near the seashore in Büyükçekmece, Istanbul, in August 2019, was found on the European side of the country. The Bosphorus strait acts as a geographical barrier between the Thracian and Anatolian regions, and no records exist yet from the Anatolian side. The researchers suggest the expansion may have occurred through the Balkans via the dense railway network connecting Bulgaria, although notably no records of the species have been found between Istanbul and the Bulgarian border. That gap itself supports the idea that the mantis is jumping between transport hubs rather than creeping continuously across the landscape.

The Slovakian record offers evidence that the species may already be established in Central Europe. In September 2024, observers photographed an adult female and male near a parking lot in Šaľa, Slovakia, and captured something remarkable: sexual cannibalism, with the female consuming the male during mating. The presence of both sexes together, mating behavior, and a second and third individual observed in the same parking area suggest a breeding population rather than a lone stowaway. A nymph recorded in Koerich, Luxembourg, in October 2024 points the same way. Perhaps most significant, the researchers argue that A. spallanzania, which is known to overwinter as a nymph in warm southern latitudes, may now be surviving the winter as a nymph in northern latitudes thanks to climate change, allowing self-sustaining populations to form well beyond the species’ historical thermal limits.

M. paykullii tells a different story. Unlike A. spallanzania, whose new records show geographical continuity across Europe, the new populations of M. paykullii in Spain and Cyprus are separated from the native range by open sea. The researchers map potential maritime dispersal routes: a shipping lane connects Israel, where natural populations occur, to Limassol in Cyprus, and the records from the Port of Limassol and nearby urban gardens suggest the species arrived by sea. Antalya, Türkiye, and Motril, Spain, both port cities, show the same pattern. There is even a direct active sea route from Israel to Salerno, Italy. Yet no records of M. paykullii exist in northern latitudes despite sea traffic from Israel to Istanbul, hinting that climate factors may currently limit the species to warm Mediterranean coastal zones.

The data compilation itself reveals how dramatically citizen science has transformed the study of these insects. For A. spallanzania, only 24% of the recorded locations came from the literature and preserved museum specimens, while 76% were sourced from citizen science platforms and social media. For M. paykullii, the imbalance is even more extreme: just 9% of locations came from traditional sources, while 91% came from citizen-sourced records. The researchers compiled records spanning 1882 to October 2024 for A. spallanzania and 1961 to 2024 for M. paykullii, categorized each location by whether it had been formally reported in the country’s literature, and generated distribution maps using QGIS geographic information system software.

The authors urge researchers to monitor both species closely, warning of their demonstrated ability to adapt easily to new regions and their potential to become invasive. The caution is grounded in precedent: the springbok mantis Miomantis caffra, native to South Africa, has established itself in Portugal and California and become invasive in New Zealand, where it preys on the native mantis Orthodera novaezealandiae. Predator species arriving in new territories can displace native mantises through predation and niche competition, and mantis invasions can also affect crops and garden ecosystems. Continued citizen science monitoring, the researchers argue, will be essential for tracking the spread dynamics of these two newcomers, assessing their impact on native species, and guiding any necessary precautions before these adaptable predators become Europe’s next established invaders.

Subject of Research: First detections of two non-native praying mantis species in seven European countries through citizen science records

Article Title: Detection of the recent arrivals of Ameles spallanzania and Miomantis paykullii in various European countries through citizen science contributions

Article References: Yılmaz, K., & Sevgili, H. (2025). Detection of the recent arrivals of Ameles spallanzania and Miomantis paykullii in various European countries through citizen science contributions. Journal of Orthoptera Research, 34(2), 175-180. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.34.140630

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.34.140630

Keywords: Detection, recent, arrivals, Ameles, spallanzania, Miomantis, paykullii, various, European, countries, citizen, science

The research team, led by Silvia Rahmelia and colleagues at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta in Indonesia, set out to clarify where civic optimism actually sits within the sprawling literature on citizen participation. The concept has been invoked to explain why citizens feel motivated to engage in democratic life, but its usage has been fragmented, often blurring into neighboring constructs such as hope, political efficacy, and civic engagement. Without conceptual precision, researchers cannot build valid measurement instruments, and without measurement, a construct risks remaining an appealing metaphor rather than a testable scientific variable.

To bring order to this conceptual chaos, the team conducted a Systematic Literature Review following the PRISMA protocol, the gold-standard procedure for transparent evidence synthesis. They searched two major databases, Scopus and ScienceDirect, for articles published between 2006 and 2026. After applying their selection criteria, 52 articles survived the screening process. Each was then subjected to thematic synthesis, a qualitative analysis technique rooted in the thematic analysis tradition of Braun and Clarke, in which recurring patterns across studies are coded and consolidated into overarching themes.

The central finding is a definition with real conceptual teeth. Civic optimism, the authors conclude, is best understood as a citizen orientation that connects individual psychological resources with expectations of democratic change through collective participation. In other words, it is not mere personal cheerfulness about politics, and it is not naive faith that everything will turn out fine. It is a structured orientation that links what individuals believe they can do — their agency — with what they expect collective action to achieve for democracy as a whole.

From the thematic synthesis, five principal dimensions emerged, and together they form the initial operationalization of the construct. The first is civic agency: the citizen’s belief in their own capacity to act and to influence public affairs. This echoes the classic political efficacy literature, which stretches back to Finkel’s 1985 panel analysis showing that participation and efficacy reinforce each other in a reciprocal loop. The second dimension is democratic trust, a differentiated confidence in democratic institutions and processes — not blind trust, but a working expectation that democratic channels can process citizen input.

The third dimension, civic literacy, refers to citizens’ knowledge and understanding of how democratic systems function, how to read political information, and how to navigate civic life. This dimension ties the construct directly to citizenship education research, including cross-national studies of teachers’ beliefs about the aims of civic education in twelve countries. The fourth is collective solidarity: the sense of shared fate and mutual obligation that binds individuals into a collective capable of acting together. This resonates strongly with the social identity model of collective action, the influential quantitative synthesis by van Zomeren and colleagues showing that group identity, efficacy beliefs, and perceived injustice jointly drive protest participation.

The fifth and perhaps most intriguing dimension is democratic future imagination — the capacity to envision alternative democratic futures worth working toward. This dimension draws on the growing futures studies literature, including work on democratic innovation labs and on hope and anticipation in education for sustainable futures. It also connects to empirical findings on civic hope, such as research showing that hope uniquely motivates political participation among Black Americans through racial emotion regulation, and experimental evidence that group efficacy beliefs predict collective action only when hope is high.

The authors are careful to position civic optimism against its conceptual neighbors. Hope, in the philosophical literature, can be individual or collective, and recent work distinguishes strong democratic hope from mere wishful thinking. Political efficacy, in contrast, is traditionally measured as internal beliefs about one’s own competence and external beliefs about the responsiveness of the system. Civic engagement is a behavioral umbrella covering everything from voting to volunteering. Civic optimism, by the new framework, is none of these alone: it is the integrative orientation that binds psychological resources to collective expectations of democratic change. The review also acknowledges a darker twin in the literature — cruel optimism, the notion that attachments to promised futures can actually block flourishing — which serves as a conceptual warning that optimism is not automatically benign.

Why does this matter beyond the seminar room? Because the paradox of persistent participation amid declining trust is one of the defining puzzles of contemporary democracy, from the Arab Spring uprisings to Spain’s 15-M movement to Chile’s student protests. Meta-analytic work on the consequences of political trust shows that trust does matter for compliance and institutional support, yet protest and civic initiatives continue even where institutional trust collapses. Civic optimism offers a candidate explanation: citizens may sustain participation not because they trust institutions, but because they retain a collective expectation that democratic change is possible through their own action. The framework also bridges three literatures that have largely talked past each other — political efficacy, civic engagement, and citizenship education — into a single conceptual architecture.

The practical payoff is a foundation for measurement. With five clearly articulated dimensions, researchers can now begin developing survey instruments that capture civic optimism as a quantifiable variable, opening the door to empirical studies of what motivates democratic participation across countries, generations, and political contexts. The authors note that their data are openly available, and they frame the work explicitly as an initial operationalization — a first scientific scaffold rather than a finished edifice. If the framework holds up under empirical scrutiny, civic optimism could become the kind of construct that transforms a viral question — why do citizens still believe in democracy? — into a measurable, testable, and ultimately answerable scientific problem.

Subject of Research: Social Sciences

Article Title: Civic optimism in the literature of citizen participation: conceptual clarification and initial operationalization

Article References: Rahmelia, S., Suyato, Sunarso, Zulkarnain, & Apandie, C. (2026). Civic optimism in the literature of citizen participation: conceptual clarification and initial operationalization. SN Social Sciences, 6(8), Article 352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01637-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01637-9

Keywords: civic optimism, citizen participation, democracy, political efficacy, civic engagement, systematic literature review, democratic trust, citizenship education, Civic, optimism, literature, citizen

The study was conducted by Lloyd George Banda of Stellenbosch University and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, together with Kamal Yakubu of Afrobarometer in Accra, Ghana. Their starting point is expectancy-disconfirmation theory, a framework originally developed in consumer research by Richard Oliver in 1980 and later adapted to the public sector by Gregg van Ryzin. According to this theory, satisfaction is not simply a function of performance; it emerges from a comparison between perceived performance and a prior reference standard called expectations. Performance that exceeds expectations produces satisfaction, performance that falls short produces dissatisfaction, and performance that merely confirms expectations leaves satisfaction moderate. The twist introduced by Banda and Yakubu is to ask what happens when those expectations are political—when the reference point against which citizens judge economic outcomes is structured by the party they identify with.

The Partisan Disconfirmation Model builds on the insight that citizens rarely form expectations about government performance in isolation. Macroeconomic outcomes are complex, delayed, and difficult to attribute clearly to government action, which means citizens confront economic information in environments that are simultaneously information-rich and cognitively demanding. Under such conditions, people rely on heuristic cues, and partisan identity is among the most powerful. Ruling-party identifiers tend to expect favorable performance, opposition identifiers tend to anticipate poorer outcomes, and these expectation differences should, in principle, shape how new economic information is interpreted. The model draws on Hypothesis Testing Theory, which conceptualizes individuals as intuitive hypothesis testers who evaluate incoming information against prior beliefs, often interpreting it in belief-consistent ways due to confirmation bias.

Crucially, the model makes a conditional prediction rather than a uniform one. When economic signals are clearly positive or clearly negative, performance assessments should dominate satisfaction judgments, leaving limited scope for prior expectations to shape evaluations. But when signals are ambiguous—mixed, weak, or uncertain—prior expectations should exert greater influence, conditioning how outcomes are interpreted. In survey terms, neutral evaluations of economic conditions, where citizens report conditions as neither good nor bad, often reflect informational ambiguity rather than a stable assessment. The researchers therefore hypothesized that partisan differences in satisfaction should be strongest when economic evaluations are neutral and attenuated when conditions are clearly favorable or clearly unfavorable. This is the disconfirmation logic: partisanship as a cognitive prior whose influence varies with the clarity of the performance signal.

To test these predictions, the team analyzed nationally representative Afrobarometer survey data from Malawi collected in 2022, covering 1,200 adult citizens with a margin of error of ±3 percent at a 95 percent confidence level. Malawi is a theoretically informative case: a unitary presidential democracy with a pluralistic party system, six transfers of power since 1994, and a vibrant civil society, yet facing significant socioeconomic challenges with an average Human Development Index value of 0.501 and GDP per capita of roughly $574 at constant 2015 prices. The dependent variable was satisfaction with government economic management, measured on a four-point ordered scale from very dissatisfied to very satisfied. The key independent variables were evaluations of current national economic conditions, classified as bad, neutral, or good, and partisan identification, distinguishing opposition supporters, ruling-party supporters, and non-partisans. The analysis estimated ordered logistic regression models with interaction terms to assess whether partisan effects varied across economic contexts, evaluated hypotheses using omnibus Wald tests of joint parameter significance, and conducted post-estimation contrasts based on predicted probabilities.

The descriptive picture alone is sobering. Eighty-five percent of respondents evaluated national economic conditions as bad, and 86 percent were dissatisfied with government economic management. Yet the regression results reveal systematic variation beneath this widespread pessimism. Compared with respondents who evaluated economic conditions as bad, those who evaluated them as neutral were over two and a half times more likely to report satisfaction (odds ratio = 2.69, p = 0.002), while those who evaluated conditions as good were more than three and a half times as likely (odds ratio = 3.67, p < 0.001). The joint Wald test confirmed a strongly significant overall economic effect (χ² = 16.72, p < 0.001), providing clear support for the performance dominance hypothesis. Perceived economic performance emerged as the strongest predictor of satisfaction with government economic management.

Partisan alignment also shaped evaluations, just as the model predicted. Ruling-party identifiers were significantly more likely to report satisfaction than opposition identifiers (odds ratio = 2.401, p = 0.001), and non-partisans fell in between, more satisfied than opposition supporters (odds ratio = 1.363, p < 0.05) but less satisfied than ruling-party identifiers. The joint test of partisanship variables was equally significant (χ² = 19.48, p < 0.001), confirming the partisan alignment effect. Among the descriptive statistics, 46 percent of ruling-party identifiers were satisfied with government economic management, compared with 34 percent of non-partisans and only 20 percent of opposition identifiers. The researchers also checked for endogeneity using a two-stage residual inclusion approach with instruments including religion, presidential performance evaluation, and employment status; all computed residuals were statistically indistinguishable from zero, indicating no significant endogeneity bias in the key variables, though the authors interpret their findings as associations rather than causation given the cross-sectional design.

The surprise came with the interaction tests. Contrary to the disconfirmation logic of the Partisan Disconfirmation Model, none of the nine pairwise interaction combinations between economic conditions and partisan identification were statistically significant. The interaction block test was not significant (χ² = 2.26, p = 0.688), indicating that perceptions of economic conditions did not vary across partisan alignment. Additional tests comparing neutral evaluations with both negative and positive evaluations similarly revealed no systematic differences in the strength of partisan effects, so the moderation hypotheses were not supported. The attenuation hypothesis fared no better: difference-in-differences tests comparing the partisan gap under neutral conditions with the gap under bad conditions (β = −0.794, p = 0.184) and under good conditions (β = −0.832, p = 0.275) found no evidence that partisan differences were larger under ambiguity. In both cases the estimated coefficients were negative, meaning partisan differences were not amplified under neutral evaluations at all.

What explains this absence of conditional partisan belief updating? The authors propose one intriguing interpretation: citizens who hold mixed or uncertain evaluations of economic conditions—those often characterized as cross-pressured, swing, or ambivalent—may not resolve ambiguity by increasing reliance on partisan cues. Rather than exhibiting stronger identity-consistent evaluation under uncertainty, such individuals may process economic and political information in a more fragmented or weakly structured manner. This is consistent with research on cross-pressured voters, which suggests that individuals facing competing evaluative signals may exhibit attenuated or less coherent political responses, and with work on political ambivalence suggesting that competing loyalties can produce cognitive fatigue, indifference, or reduced decisiveness rather than heightened motivated reasoning. The data do not directly measure political disengagement, but the pattern is consistent with forms of ambivalence that future research could examine more directly.

The broader implications are considerable. The findings challenge claims in some African political behavior literature that political attitudes are primarily driven by identity-based loyalties such as ethnicity or partisan attachment. Instead, the evidence indicates that citizens in Malawi respond to perceived economic conditions when forming judgments about government performance, reinforcing a growing body of research showing that voters in emerging democracies often evaluate governments based on perceived policy outcomes. Partisan identity operates as a stable and additive influence on satisfaction rather than as a conditional cognitive prior that varies with the clarity of economic signals. The study also highlights socio-demographic patterns: female respondents were significantly less likely than men to report satisfaction (odds ratio ≈ 0.75, p < 0.05), and lived poverty was negatively associated with satisfaction (odds ratio ≈ 0.84, p < 0.01), meaning individuals experiencing higher levels of deprivation were about 16 percent less likely to report satisfaction. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the use of partisan identification as a proxy for predictive expectations and the operationalization of ambiguity through neutral evaluations, and they call for panel surveys and experimental designs that directly measure expectations prior to evaluation. For now, the message from Malawi is clear: the economy beats the party, and ambiguity does not systematically amplify identity-based reasoning in this context—an important boundary condition in the relationship between partisanship and economic evaluations.

Subject of Research: Government's economic management and citizen satisfaction: a Partisan Disconfirmation Model

Article Title: Government's economic management and citizen satisfaction: a Partisan Disconfirmation Model

Article References: Banda, L. G., & Yakubu, K. (2026). Government's economic management and citizen satisfaction: a Partisan Disconfirmation Model. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1719133. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1719133

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1719133

Keywords: Government's, economic, management, citizen, satisfaction, Partisan, Disconfirmation, Model, scientific research

The story began on October 1, 2024, when a fisherman from Sanlúcar de Barrameda retrieved a cylindrical baited trap net, 4.5 meters long with a 50-centimeter diameter and 6-centimeter mesh, that had been deployed for 24 hours at a depth of about one meter. The trap, baited with a chicken carcass, was targeting the invasive blue crab Callinectes sapidus, and the haul was substantial: 613 blue crabs with an estimated total biomass of roughly 150 kilograms. Among them was one animal the fisherman had never encountered in his traps before. Instead of preserving the specimen, he recorded it on video, a decision that proved decisive because the footage contained enough detail for scientists to make a confident identification.

Back at the laboratory, researchers extracted frames from the video at a rate of 10 frames per second using FFmpeg software, yielding 364 usable images. Morphometric measurements were then estimated with ImageJ2 image analysis software, using a standardized reference object in the frames, the fisher’s fingernail, to calibrate scale. The specimen’s total length was estimated at approximately 7 centimeters, with a carapace length of 28 millimeters and a rostrum length of 21.5 millimeters. The identification relied on diagnostic morphological traits and taxonomic keys, including the rostral formula, the relative proportions of the segments of the second pereiopods, and chela ornamentation, particularly the presence of tubercles and setae. The animal displayed a mostly transparent body with small dark-brown dots, a nearly straight rostrum bearing 12 to 13 dorsal teeth spaced at regular intervals, and a finely tuberculated carapace.

The most telling features were the second pair of pereiopods, which were well developed and elongated, dark brown with beige spots, and bore claws covered with numerous setae. These elongated limbs, which in large adults of Macrobrachium can exceed the body length, are structurally identical to each other, a trait that distinguishes this specimen from other species in the genus and from any known native palaemonid shrimp in the region. The Iberian Peninsula hosts 18 species of the family Palaemonidae, 11 of which are present in the Gulf of Cadiz and the Guadalquivir estuary, including several Palaemon species and the non-native P. macrodactylus, itself introduced around 1997 to 1999. None of these native species display the elongated, setose second pereiopods characteristic of Macrobrachium, which is why researchers conservatively referred to the Guadalquivir animal as M. cf. nipponense, pending future integrative taxonomy combining morphological and molecular approaches if additional individuals are collected.

The oriental river prawn is native to East and Southeast Asia, with a natural distribution spanning eastern China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Taiwan. Since the 1960s, however, it has expanded far beyond this range through a combination of aquaculture transfers, ballast water discharge, and the ornamental pet trade. The literature review conducted for this study, using Web of Knowledge searches cross-verified with GBIF database records and citizen science platforms, compiled 191 records from 21 countries, drawn from 33 publications. In the former Soviet Union, the species was introduced via aquaculture transfers from the Yangtze River basin as early as the 1950s, initially into lakes of the Arnasay system and fish farms in Uzbekistan, from where it spread through the movement of fish stocking material into Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and power station reservoirs across Eastern Europe. By the 1980s it was recorded in natural freshwater systems in Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, and more recently in Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, and Hungary.

The species’ success in temperate regions is linked to remarkable environmental tolerance. It reproduces above 20 degrees Celsius but can survive winter temperatures as low as 2 to 4 degrees Celsius, enabling persistence across European climates. It typically grows to 5 to 8 centimeters, prefers clean, slow-flowing waters with a pH of 6.5 to 7.5 and temperatures between 20 and 28 degrees Celsius, and can tolerate salinities up to 10. These thresholds align closely with conditions in the Guadalquivir estuary, where temperatures range from 12.5 to 27 degrees Celsius and salinity follows a horizontal gradient, from oligohaline and mesohaline waters in the inner stretch to values of 6 to 22 along the estuary during the dry season. In the last decade the prawn has rapidly expanded in the Danube and Dniester River basins, where it is now reproducing and well established, and molecular analyses suggest multiple introduction events, with haplotypes tracing back to Chinese populations.

How the prawn reached the Guadalquivir remains uncertain, but the researchers hypothesize that accidental transport in ballast water is the most plausible vector, potentially facilitated by increased maritime traffic from the Danube River Basin since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Port of Seville, reachable by commercial shipping extending 80 kilometers inland along one of Europe’s major navigable rivers, experienced an increase in goods received from the Danube Basin in 2023, intensifying connections with regions where M. nipponense is established and, in some cases, considered invasive. Data from the port’s annual reports between 2015 and 2023 show that the total volume of goods unloaded from countries where the prawn has been reported varied over time, although these figures represent total national imports rather than specific shipments from confirmed regions. Notably, Bulgaria and Germany recorded their first detections only after this reporting period. Introductions via aquaculture or the pet trade cannot be ruled out either, given that the species is one of the world’s major farmed aquatic animals.

The ecological stakes are considerable. In the Danube and Dniester basins, the prawn’s expansion has raised concerns about its interactions with native Palaemon species and its role as a vector for pathogens affecting wild and farmed crustaceans. The species feeds on a wide range of items, including phytoplankton, detritus, mollusks, and benthic invertebrates such as chironomid larvae, and can act as a trophic link in aquatic food webs. Its growing presence in commercial catches in invaded systems suggests rising population sizes and potential economic impacts. In the Guadalquivir estuary, already recognized as a bioinvasion hotspot driven by habitat modification and climate change, an established Macrobrachium population could compete with native decapods for resources, disrupt benthic community structures, and potentially transmit pathogens, pressures that would compound the effects of the euryhaline blue crab and other non-native species already reshaping the estuary’s ecology.

Only a single individual has been detected so far, and the researchers emphasize that early detection and continuous monitoring are essential to determine whether the species is merely a transient arrival or the leading edge of an establishment event. They recommend a combined strategy that includes systematic field surveys, environmental DNA monitoring, and collaboration with local fishers through citizen science initiatives. Based on the experience of countries where Macrobrachium populations have become established or invasive within the last decade, they advise implementing an early detection system that records each sighting or capture, including the coordinates of the detection site, the number of individuals observed, and their sex, for example the presence of ovigerous females, which would signal local reproduction. The Guadalquivir estuary is already covered by a long-term ecological research program, and the researchers argue that layering citizen science on top of systematic monitoring can multiply the spatial and temporal coverage of biodiversity surveillance.

The episode is a striking demonstration of how much a motivated non-expert can contribute to invasion biology. Marine and coastal ecosystems are vast and difficult to monitor systematically, so many non-native species remain undetected for years, sometimes reaching high population densities before being officially recorded, by which point the window for control measures has narrowed or closed. Citizen science initiatives engaging recreational divers, fishers, and local communities have proven effective at tracking the spread of non-native marine fishes, crustaceans, and mollusks in European waters, and they raise public awareness about biological invasions along the way. In this case, a fisherman’s surprise at an unfamiliar animal in his trap, and his decision to film it rather than discard it, gave scientists the evidence needed to document a genus-level first for the Iberian Peninsula and to begin planning a response before the oriental river prawn can dig in along the Atlantic coast of southern Europe.

Subject of Research: A new non-native species detected through citizen science: the presence of a Macrobrachium species ( Decapoda , Palaemonidae ) in the Guadalquivir River estuary (SW Spain), with an overview of its global spread

Article Title: A new non-native species detected through citizen science: the presence of a Macrobrachium species ( Decapoda , Palaemonidae ) in the Guadalquivir River estuary (SW Spain), with an overview of its global spread

Article References: de Carvalho-Souza, G. F., Cuesta, J. A., & González-Ortegón, E. (2025). A new non-native species detected through citizen science: the presence of a Macrobrachium species (Decapoda, Palaemonidae) in the Guadalquivir River estuary (SW Spain), with an overview of its global spread. Estuarine Management and Technologies, 2, 71-86. https://doi.org/10.3897/emt.2.165887

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/emt.2.165887

Keywords: non-native, species, detected, citizen, science, presence, Macrobrachium, Decapoda, Palaemonidae, Guadalquivir, River, estuary

The research, led by Samuel T. Iniunam of the A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute, documents a dramatic shift in who contributes bird records in Nigeria. Before structured training programs began, indigenous birders were largely absent from national databases. After training, their participation surged.

The study documents the history of birding in Nigeria, from the colonial era to the present. It shows how the Nigerian Ornithologists’ Society, founded in the colonial period, was dominated by expatriates for decades. The society’s membership only began to diversify after the A. P. Leventis Institute began training programs.

The training programs combined classroom instruction with field experience. Participants learned bird identification, survey methods, and data recording. The programs also provided equipment, removing a major barrier to participation.

The results show a dramatic increase in indigenous participation after training. Before training, indigenous birders were largely absent from national databases. After training, their participation surged, with many becoming active contributors to conservation.

The study also documents the barriers that historically kept indigenous people out of birding. These included lack of equipment, lack of training, and the dominance of expatriates in ornithological societies. The training programs addressed each of these barriers directly.

The research has implications for conservation across the tropical world. It shows how structured training can open the door to indigenous participation in birding and conservation. The approach could be replicated in other countries where indigenous people are underrepresented in ornithology.

The study is a landmark in the history of birding in Nigeria. It documents how structured training can transform who participates in birding and conservation. The approach offers a model for other tropical countries seeking to diversify participation in ornithology.

The study draws on more than two decades of records from eBird, the global checklist platform launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in 2002, alongside data from the Nigerian Bird Atlas Project, known as NiBAP, which was established in 2015 with support from Swedish and South African partners. By comparing checklist submission rates before and after participation in the Introductory Ornithology Field Course, the researchers were able to quantify how formal training translated into sustained data collection behavior. This before-and-after design is important because it moves beyond anecdote, offering measurable evidence that capacity building changes who contributes to biodiversity databases and how often they do so.

Nigeria provides an instructive setting for this work. The country spans roughly 923,769 square kilometers and holds a human population exceeding 230 million people, distributed across coastal, savanna, and arid ecological zones. Its avifauna is correspondingly rich, with authoritative checklists such as that of the African Bird Club recognizing 921 species, while citizen science platforms report between 760 and 880 species depending on the dataset consulted. This gap between documented and platform-recorded diversity itself illustrates the under-sampling problem that broader local participation could help address. In a nation where demographic expansion and dependence on natural resources place considerable pressure on biodiversity, mobilizing residents as monitors offers a pragmatic route to conservation data at scale.

The historical context the researchers document helps explain why participation was so skewed for so long. Ornithology in Nigeria took shape during the colonial era and remained dominated by expatriate researchers for decades afterward. The Nigerian Ornithological Society, founded in February 1964, initially consisted mainly of European ornithologists working in British West Africa. In 1977 it expanded into the West African Ornithological Society to incorporate francophone colleagues from former French colonies, yet African representation in governance stayed minimal for a remarkably long time. The first indigenous council member joined only in 2000, and the council today comprises six Africans and four Europeans, a balance that signals genuine but recent change. Professional capacity followed a similarly slow trajectory. When the A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute opened in 2001, fewer than five Nigerian ornithologists held PhDs, and no formal training programs or dedicated institutions had previously existed.

Against this backdrop, the scale of informal birding activity before 2015 appears strikingly small. Birdwatching in Nigeria was then confined to a community of fewer than 200 active participants, operating largely under the Lekki and Ibadan Bird Clubs, which the Nigerian Conservation Foundation had established in 2009 and 2014 respectively. The researchers frame this scarcity not as a failure of interest but as a consequence of missing infrastructure: accessible training pathways, mentorship, and peer networks that in Europe and North America had accumulated over more than a century of recreational natural history and volunteer-based monitoring schemes.

The theoretical framing of the study draws on participation-based frameworks including social learning theory, communities of practice, and diffusion of innovations. These perspectives hold that sustained involvement in citizen science depends not merely on individual motivation but on access to skills, mentorship, and social networks that allow newcomers to learn experientially and integrate into scientific practice. NiBAP’s strategy operationalized this insight through two complementary mechanisms. Formal training came through workshops and field courses that built technical proficiency in identification and survey methods. Informal training came through the deliberate establishment of bird clubs that paired trained ornithologists with amateur birdwatchers and nature enthusiasts, enabling knowledge transfer through everyday social interaction and cultivating communities of practice that could sustain engagement long after formal instruction ended.

The quantitative results lend strong support to this model. Checklist submission rates rose markedly among participants after completing the field course, and comparisons of eBird contributions from 2000 to 2024 show a clear divergence between indigenous and expatriate contributor trajectories, with indigenous participation climbing substantially once capacity building took hold. Questionnaire responses from NiBAP volunteers add a qualitative layer, revealing both the motivations that draw people into birding and the barriers that had previously kept them out, from limited awareness of citizen science to the absence of equipment and social entry points.

The study also points to a regional benchmark for what sustained investment can achieve. The Southern African Bird Atlas Project, launched in 2007, cultivated a substantial volunteer community producing fine-scale bird distribution data across a diverse landscape, demonstrating that citizen science at national scale is attainable in the global South when training and community development receive long-term support. Nigeria’s experience suggests a transferable sequence: build professional capacity first, embed it in institutions, then use those institutions to train and mentor volunteer networks that feed standardized data into global platforms.

For the wider field of biodiversity monitoring, the implications extend beyond ornithology. Citizen science datasets increasingly underpin species distribution models, conservation planning, and international reporting, yet their coverage remains uneven and often weakest precisely where biodiversity is richest. If the barriers documented in Nigeria, including limited expertise, low awareness, and weak knowledge-exchange infrastructure, are common across developing countries, then the capacity-building framework tested here offers a scalable template. The finding that community-driven training and inclusive outreach can lower entry barriers while producing measurable gains in technical proficiency and sustained engagement suggests that broadening participation is not only an equity goal but a practical strategy for improving the quality and completeness of the ecological record in the tropics.

Subject of Research: Indigenous participation in tropical birding

Article Title: Capacity building as a pathway to indigenous participation in tropical birding and citizen science

Article References: Ivande, S. T., Abalaka, J. I., Atuo, F. A., Barshep, Y., Chaskda, A. A., Dami, F. D., Danmallam, B. A., Egbe, S. W., Iniunam, I. A., Iwajomo, S. B., Kumdet, P. S., Kazeh, N. W., Manu, S. A., Onoja, J. D., Ringim, A. S., Tende, T., & Ottosson, U. (2026). Capacity building as a pathway to indigenous participation in tropical birding and citizen science. Frontiers in Bird Science, 5, Article 1797647. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1797647

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1797647

Keywords: birding, conservation, Nigeria, indigenous participation, tropical ornithology, Capacity, building, pathway, indigenous, participation, tropical, citizen

The research team, led by Hee Jin Chung of the Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit at UC Davis’s Veterinary Genetics Laboratory, recruited owners of indoor–outdoor cats in Davis and Sacramento, California. Participants were given simple kits containing ethanol-filled tubes, nitrile gloves, and a printed log, and were asked to collect five of their cat’s fecal samples over several weeks, along with a sample of whatever food the cat was being fed. Between November 8 and December 21, 2023, the team received 38 scats from eight neutered house cats—three males and five females—whose samples were, for anonymity, labeled Cat A through Cat H. Most samples came straight from litter boxes and were collected within hours of defecation, making them unusually fresh for molecular work.

The technical core of the study was DNA metabarcoding, a sequencing approach that identifies the mixture of DNA left behind in feces. The researchers amplified two mitochondrial markers: the 12S rRNA gene to detect vertebrate prey and the 16S rRNA gene to detect invertebrates. Because cat DNA overwhelmingly dominates cat feces, the team designed a custom blocking oligonucleotide—a short synthetic molecule carrying a three-carbon spacer—that binds to domestic cat sequences and stalls their amplification, allowing dietary DNA to be recovered more easily. Sequencing was performed on an Illumina platform, and the resulting reads were processed with cutadapt and DADA2, which identify distinct amplicon sequence variants, before taxa were assigned using BLAST searches against custom and NCBI reference libraries. Samples below strict read-count and identity thresholds were discarded to guard against contamination.

The results were striking, and somewhat humbling for anyone who assumes their cat is quietly devastating the neighborhood. Of 32 analyzable scat samples, roughly a third contained no vertebrate DNA at all except that of the cat itself. Most of the remainder revealed only anthropogenic food items—chicken, pig, turkey, and fish from the drum, hake, and herring families—matching the provisioned pet foods owners submitted for comparison. In total, only a single scat, produced by Cat H, contained wild vertebrate prey: the California vole, Microtus californicus, a common rodent in the region. The cat that produced it had not been seen with any prey by its owner in the preceding 24 hours.

Even more revealing were the three cases where owners did witness their cats carrying prey—a live house mouse caught indoors, a small unidentified rodent brought to the door, and a lizard caught in front of the home. In every instance the prey was alive and intact, and in every instance the corresponding scat, produced within 24 hours, contained no wild prey DNA whatsoever. The findings suggest that domestic cats frequently hunt without consuming what they catch, consistent with earlier camera-collar studies showing that satiated cats hunt for enrichment, practice, or caching rather than nutrition. They also imply that significant prey consumption is needed before prey DNA becomes detectable in feces, meaning molecular scat analysis and owner reports capture different facets of the same hunting behavior—and should be used together.

The comparison between provisioned food and scat also yielded a methodological surprise. Chicken and pig DNA appeared in all four collected food samples, as expected, but recovery of those ingredients in the corresponding scats varied widely. Chicken, present in nearly every relevant food, showed up in 14 of 15 expected scat samples, making it the most digestible and detectable ingredient. By contrast, the two prescription diets—a hydrolyzed-protein formula and a kidney-care wet food—showed the poorest post-digestion recovery, likely because heavy industrial processing degrades DNA before the food even reaches the bowl. Notably, several scats from cats eating animal-based diets contained no animal DNA other than cat DNA, a finding with implications beyond cats: urban wildlife studies routinely identify pet food as an anthropogenic food source in carnivore scats, and this study suggests such DNA may often be too degraded to detect.

The team also tested a cost-saving shortcut that could matter for future studies: pooling. Because DNA extraction and sequencing are expensive, they homogenized subsamples of three to five scats from each cat into a single pooled sample, then compared pooled results against individually extracted samples. The answer was mixed. Common items such as chicken were recovered reliably regardless of pooling, and for two cats the two approaches matched perfectly. But the study’s only wild prey detection—the California vole—appeared only in the individually extracted sample and vanished in the pooled version. When the target of a study is a rare or rarely consumed prey item, the authors conclude, pooling samples before extraction can erase exactly the signal researchers are looking for.

The invertebrate results illustrate another caution. The 16S data were compromised by heavy contamination in negative controls and poor amplification, and although Orthoptera, flies, true bugs, jumping spiders, and noctuid moths were detected in some scats, the team excluded the invertebrate dataset from formal analysis. Primer bias is a further limitation: the 12S primers used here perform poorly on reptiles and amphibians, so the absence of lizard DNA in the scats—despite one owner reporting a caught lizard—may reflect molecular bias rather than true absence. The authors recommend that future studies pair molecular methods with morphological analysis of scat contents to avoid missing entire taxonomic groups.

Despite its small sample size and short duration—cats were sampled for an average of about 12 days—the study demonstrates that owned cats, paired with their willing owners, can serve as a viable study system for predator diet research. Citizen-science sample collection slashes the cost and effort of fieldwork, while owner logs add behavioral context that scat alone cannot provide. And because neither sterilization nor regular feeding reliably suppresses hunting, even well-fed, neutered cats remain relevant to wildlife conservation, particularly where vulnerable prey such as the endangered Amargosa vole, a California vole subspecies, persist. The broader lesson is that a single tool will never fully capture the ecology of a predator that hunts both out of hunger and out of instinct. DNA metabarcoding catches the meals owners never see; owner questionnaires catch the trophies cats bring home uneaten. Used together, they offer the clearest picture yet of what the world’s most popular pet is really doing to the wildlife in its own backyard.

Subject of Research: DNA metabarcoding of owner-collected scat samples to assess the diet and wild prey consumption of owned domestic cats.

Article Title: Using DNA Metabarcoding and Citizen Science to Assess the Diet of Owned Domestic Cats

Article References: Chung, H. J., Vanderzwan, S. L., & Sacks, B. N. (2026). Using DNA Metabarcoding and Citizen Science to Assess the Diet of Owned Domestic Cats. Ecology and Evolution, 16(9), Article e74404. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74404

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74404

Keywords: domestic cat, DNA metabarcoding, citizen science, diet analysis, wildlife conservation, California vole, pet food, hunting behavior, scat samples, owned cats, Metabarcoding, Citizen

The urgency behind the paper stems from the escalating ecological crisis and the growing recognition that the way humanity values nature shapes how it is protected or destroyed. People value nature in profoundly different ways: instrumentally, for the material benefits it provides; intrinsically, for its existence independent of any human observer; and relationally, through the meanings, identities and social bonds that arise from human–nature interactions. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, emphasized in its 2022 Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature that most current valuation processes capture only a narrow slice of these values, typically monetary and quantitative ones, which can produce environmental injustices and conflicts while ignoring worldviews of indigenous peoples and local communities.

To translate plural valuation into practice, researchers have identified four values-centered leverage points for transformative change: recognizing the diverse values of nature in valuation methods; embedding those values into decision-making; reforming policies, rights and regulations to internalize nature’s values; and shifting the deeper societal norms, beliefs and goals that underpin how people relate to nature and to each other. Drawing on leverage point theory popularized by Donella Meadows, the authors note that these intervention points cascade in depth—shallower points are easier to act on but yield less change, while deeper points are harder to activate but hold far greater transformative potential when engaged.

The new perspective, the product of two expert workshops hosted by the Open Universiteit in 2022 and 2023, systematically maps how citizen science can strengthen interventions at each of these leverage points. At the first point, recognizing diverse values, citizen science initiatives such as Drinkable Rivers, Curieuze Neuzen in Belgium, and the Dutch Network Ecological Monitoring demonstrate that the questions citizens ask and the species or landscapes they monitor often reflect deeply held values and concerns. Because participants are drawn from varied localities, socio-economic backgrounds and identities, their involvement can widen the spectrum of values that enter formal valuation, though the authors caution that environmental citizen science remains biased toward quantitative data collection, overrepresenting instrumental and intrinsic values while leaving relational values largely implicit.

Measuring relational values—attachments to places, species and nature in general—requires methodological innovation. The researchers point to emerging approaches such as citizens’ written letters to trees, micronarratives and behavioral data on species preferences, which can be combined with ecological measurements to illuminate socio-ecological interactions. They also flag a fundamental trade-off: methods capable of capturing rich detail about people’s values tend to be more complex and time-consuming, reducing the volume of data collected, while high-volume approaches may flatten the very diversity of values that plural valuation seeks to reveal.

At the second leverage point, embedding valuation into inclusive decision-making, the evidence is striking. Citizen-collected air quality data from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade in the United States and the Samen Meten program run by the Dutch national public health institute have shaped governmental policy agendas. In Europe, citizen observatories deliberately link citizens, scientists and decision-makers in shared monitoring of local environments. The authors document cases where citizen science has even entered the courtroom: plastic pollution data gathered by volunteers contributed to a petrochemical company being found liable, and species observations by Swedish citizens have been used in environmental court cases. Participation also reshapes personal decisions, with studies showing that citizen scientists adopt more biodiversity-friendly gardening practices and strengthen their personal connection to nature—effects that ripple outward through the communities and social networks these initiatives create.

Yet the path is not without obstacles. Doubts about the quality of citizen-generated data among scientists and policymakers, persistent power dynamics in decision-making circles, and a lack of agency, skills or resources among decision-makers all constrain uptake. Studies further reveal a persistent demographic skew: citizen science participants tend to be white, highly educated, older and more affluent, which narrows the knowledge produced and limits environmental justice. At the third, deeper leverage point of institutional reform, the authors highlight structural embedding efforts such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s agreement to involve citizens in knowledge co-creation and the more4nature initiative, which seeks to institutionalize collaboration between citizen science projects and authorities responsible for policy implementation and monitoring. But they also warn that institutionalization carries risks: when data flow into analytical pipelines, ties with the volunteers who collected them can weaken, and the sense of pride and emotional enrichment that motivates citizen scientists can erode if their knowledge becomes an untraceable instrument.

The deepest leverage point—shifting societal norms and paradigms—is where citizen science may hold its most profound potential. Empirical studies show that participation strengthens place attachment, nature connectedness and nature-noticing over both short and long timescales. Communities formed around monitoring projects build shared values and collective action, and so-called citizen science ambassadors inspire pro-environmental attitudes in their social circles. The authors caution, however, that it is methodologically difficult to distinguish values genuinely transformed by participation from values participants already held, and some longitudinal studies find no attitude change because participants began with strongly positive orientations toward nature. Measuring such shifts demands new approaches that explicitly track emotional connectedness and underlying norms.

From this analysis the team distills three overarching recommendations. First, recognize and measure: relational values must be made explicit in citizen science design, supported by new quantitative and qualitative methods, since they are both key motivations for participation and outcomes strengthened by it. Second, embrace diversity: plural valuation calls for plural publics, meaning the full variety of citizen science formats—from top-down governmental programs to grassroots community-led efforts—should be cultivated, with flexible roles that allow citizens, scientists and policymakers to grow into varied responsibilities. Third, pursue structural integration: case-by-case policy engagement is growing, but lasting change requires structural funding, long-term collaborations, storytelling that showcases how citizen science has informed decisions, and open science principles that ease institutionalization into policy processes.

The authors conclude that uniting citizen science and plural valuation is not merely an academic win–win but a necessary foundation for inclusive, effective environmental action and conservation. As governments worldwide struggle to meet biodiversity targets amid widening distrust in institutions, the perspective suggests a practical and democratizing pathway: the millions of volunteers already counting birds, measuring rivers and sensing air pollution are not just collecting data—they are articulating, practicing and fostering a richer, more plural vision of what nature is worth, and in doing so, they may be pulling the deepest levers of transformative change.

Subject of Research: Integrating citizen science with plural valuation of nature to leverage transformative change

Article Title: Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change

Article References: Verploegen, H., Dyke, A. J., Ganzevoort, W., Hugé, J., Jacobs, S., Neuteleers, S., Prats López, M., Verschuuren, B., & Wehn, U. (2026). Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Keywords: citizen science, plural valuation, transformative change, relational values, environmental policy, IPBES, leverage points, biodiversity, nature connectedness, environmental justice, Uniting, citizen