Abstract Community science is a community‐led scientific mode of inquiry, sustained by social learning, for the purpose of transforming environmental governance. We present a case study of a community science initiative from Mexico's Water Forest, where a grassroots organization, the Milpa Alta Biological Monitoring Group, co‐designed a vegetation monitoring protocol with a university team to evaluate a community‐designed intervention to restore the understory of mixed forest‐grassland ecosystems that had been degraded by dense tree plantations. Through this partnership, we developed a technically sound, accessible line‐point‐intercept sampling protocol suitable for evaluating the restoration intervention aimed at increasing canopy openness through tree thinning to restore understory vegetation. As expected, plantations had poor understory development compared to natural areas, but there were no significant differences between managed (thinned) and unmanaged plantation stands. Nonetheless, we detected highly significant positive associations of canopy light and understory vegetation development when all plantations were pooled. This apparent contradiction was clarified through a collaborative data analysis process that combined the review of statistical results with collective memories of the management process. This dialogic analysis showed that the lack of significance likely stemmed from a failure to manipulate treatment sufficiently during the management. We also identified shrubs as a proxy for ecological associations of the plantation understory, which revealed an assemblage from mixed communities. A key lesson is that, while feasible data collection is necessary, our experiences show that advancing a community science project also depends on fostering conditions and mutual capacity for collaborative data interpretation and analysis.
Galeana et al. (Tue,) studied this question.