Smartphone technologies supporting community-based environmental monitoring and implementation: a systematic scoping review

The prospect of leveraging new technologies for community-based environmental monitoring has captured the imagination of many scientists, policy makers, and conservation professionals. This systematic review examines the state of knowledge and trends in the peer-reviewed literature related to the use of smartphone technologies for community and citizen science environmental monitoring. We organize our findings in relation to data collection and data handling, the process of developing smartphone applications, and the ways that outcomes are reported. While the literature is nascent and technological advances are continually opening new opportunities, it is notable that there is limited scholarship that explicitly connects the monitoring function of smartphones to tangible conservation action (e.g., only 10 percent of the papers analysed data collected by smartphones, let alone making connections to required actions or policy). We discuss two central implications in terms of research-implementation spaces for environmental monitoring with smartphones: (1) what we identify as the cost paradox, the lack of recognition of actual costs of app development, monitoring, and implementation; and (2) the need to center the role of people and partnerships in order to ask more precise questions about outcomes for app users and conservation impacts from data collection. We conclude with a call for more research on costs and actual impacts, documentation of factors that lead to successes and failures, and how digital divides influence conservation outcomes. Our intent is not to call into question the potential impacts of smartphone technologies, but to encourage further understanding of how and when they can be most useful.