Opportunities and challenges for monitoring a recolonizing large herbivore using citizen science.

Monitoring is a prerequisite for evidence-based wildlife management and conservation planning, yet conventional monitoring approaches are often ineffective for species occurring at low densities. However, some species such as large mammals are often observed by lay people and this information can be leveraged through citizen science monitoring schemes. To ensure that such wildlife monitoring efforts provide robust inferences, assessing the quantity, quality, and potential biases of citizen science data is crucial.