Citizen meets social science: predicting volunteer involvement in a global freshwater monitoring experiment

Abstract

FreshWater Watch is a global citizen science project that seeks to advance the understanding and stewardship of freshwater ecosystems across the globe through analysis of their physical and chemical properties by volunteers. To date, literature concerning citizen science has mainly focused on its potential to generate unprecedented volumes of data. In this paper, we focus instead on the data relating to the volunteer experience and ask key questions about volunteer engagement with the project. For example, we ask what factors influence: a) volunteer data submission following a training event and b) the number of water quality samples volunteers subsequently submit. We used a binomial model to identify the factors that influence the retention of volunteers after training. In addition, we used a generalized linear model (GLM) to examine the factors that affected the number of samples each citizen scientist submitted. In line with other citizen science projects, most people trained did not submit any data, and 1% of participants contributed 47% of the data. We found that the statistically significant factors associated with submission of data after training were: whether training was given on how to upload data, the number of volunteers that attended the training, whether the volunteer was assigned to a research team, the outside temperature, and the average engagement of others in the training group. The statistically significant factors associated with the quantity of data submitted were: the length of time volunteers were active in the project, whether training took place as part of a paid work day, the difficulty of the sampling procedure, how socially involved volunteers were in the project, average sampling group size, and engagement with online learning modules. Based on our results, we suggest that intrinsic motivation may be important for predicting volunteer retention after training and the number of samples collected subsequently. We suggest that, to maximize the contribution of citizen science to our understanding of the world around us, there is an urgent need to better understand the factors that drive volunteer retention and engagement.

Using citizen science to improve the conservation of the European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) in the Thames River Basin District

“…However, the proportion of active trainees in our study may be higher than in many other citizen science initiatives, especially because some volunteers may have participated in monitoring but never uploaded data. The proportion of trainees that never participated after training day is 80% for FreshWater Watch (August et al 2019, this issue) and 62% for Evolution MegaLab (Worthington et al 2012). Building the capacity for long-term monitoring is key to supporting the provision of eel recruitment data that can be used by ecosystem managers.…”

How citizen scientists can enrich freshwater science as contributors, collaborators, and co-creators

“…Further, motivations are likely to vary according to people's inherent regard for nature, occupation, age, and wealth (Geoghegan et al 2016). Other factors that influence the longevity of involvement by a project participant may relate to a feeling of community (participant to participant and participant to scientist engagement), the quality of training given (August et al 2019, this issue), the condition of the environment they are to survey (Marsh et al 2019, this issue), or the role of participant in the design process (Irwin 2018). This latter point also reflects participant confidence, a lack of which has been found to deter continued involvement (Storey et al 2016).…”

Citizen science and aquatic macroinvertebrates: public engagement for catchment-scale pollution vigilance

“…When planning long-term monitoring, consideration needs to be given to the non-random factors influencing volunteer retention and drop out, in which the quality of relationships developed and sharing of perspectives plays a major role (see, for example: August et al 2019;Groulx et al 2019;Marsh and Cosentino 2019). Approaches to sustaining volunteer engagement should be reappraised considering the importance of maintaining links between the data collectors, the accumulating data, and the monitoring outcomes as stressed by Roy et al (2012) and Pocock et al (2014).…”