Documenting Changing Landscapes With Rephotosa: A Repeat Photography And Citizen Science Project In Southern Africa

Ground-based repeat photography has a long history in documenting landscape change. Given the growing concern over the scale and rate of global change related phenomena, such as climate and land-use change, the benefits of involving the wider public in data collection efforts is increasingly being realised. Public involvement is particularly useful in national- and international-scale photographic monitoring projects where data collection spans relatively large spatial scales and is consequently expensive to gather, local knowledge is useful, and no specific training and only basic photographic equipment is required. Several research-grade repeat photography projects exist worldwide, but few rely on the involvement of citizen scientists. Here we introduce a citizen science repeat photography project of southern African landscapes: rePhotoSA. We evaluate the progress of the project to date and describe the level of utility of citizen science contributions to research. We also reflect on four key activities that are needed to ensure the long-term success of the project including attracting and keeping citizen scientists involved, maintaining data quality, providing accurate photo-site location information, and effective dissemination of scientific knowledge to the public. We conclude that the continued use of historical photographs as a unique source of historical environmental data to complement traditional scientific methods of data collection may improve our overall understanding of changing landscapes, and may serve as an effective means of illustrating landscape- and global change to the general public.