The hidden structure of unstructured citizen science insect monitoring

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Insects are vastly under-represented in biodiversity monitoring, leading to uncertainties about their trends. Semi-structured monitoring, relying on protocol reporting than protocol standardization, has emerged as a promising and more flexible alternative to structured monitoring, retaining broad participation. We examined the potential opportunities and barriers for semi-structured monitoring of insects, using dragonfly monitoring in the UK as a case study. We found that many insect recorders already follow attributes of structured surveying, reporting complete species lists, collecting abundance data and revisiting the same sites. Most are also willing to report more comprehensive metadata, such as survey effort, but only a subset would follow a fully standardised protocol. We outline the key ecological and modelling opportunities if semi-structured monitoring were enhanced, but also identify the specific challenges for insects. Our findings highlight the overlooked structure within citizen science monitoring data that could be leveraged for more robust analyses of insect biodiversity change. https://doi.org/10.32942/X20S9Z Biodiversity biodiversity monitoring; Humboldt extension; semi-structured recording; survey protocols Published: 2025-11-11 15:41 Last Updated: 2025-11-11 15:41 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts of interest to declare Language: English