Absolutely. In fact, we have a citizen science program within Ocean Networks Canada called “community fishers”, in which we provide instruments to fishermen who go offshore to areas that are not covered by our observing network and take regular measurements by lowering instruments to the sea floor using their fishing gear. These are automatically uploaded to our baseline.
There are a lot of different sources of information for monitoring MPAs. I don't think it needs to be strictly DFO or academic scientists who do it, but we do need to coordinate this.