Evaluating citizen science outreach: A case-study with The Peregrine Fund’s American Kestrel Partnership

Abstract

Citizen science programs can be powerful drivers of knowledge and scientific understanding and, in recent decades, they have become increasingly popular. Conducting successful research with the aid of citizen scientists often rests on the efficacy of a program’s outreach strategies. Program evaluation is increasingly recognized as a critical practice for citizen science practitioners to ensure that all efforts, including outreach, contribute to the overall goals of the program. The Peregrine Fund’s American Kestrel Partnership (AKP) is one such citizen science program that relies on outreach to engage participants in effective monitoring of a declining falcon species. Here, we examine whether various communication strategies were associated with desired outreach goals of the AKP. We demonstrate how social media, webcams, discussion boards, and newsletters were associated with perception of learning, agreement with our conservation messaging, and participation in our box monitoring program. Our results thus help us to improve our outreach methodology, suggest areas where other citizen science programs might improve their outreach efforts, and highlight future research priorities.

Influence of an extreme event—the COVID-19 pandemic—On establishment of and data collection by a citizen science project

“…This partnership fosters a learning opportunity for all involved groups, with volunteers gaining scientific literacy and knowledge of ecological issues and researchers gaining valuable data [3][4][5][6][7]. The data gathered, which often covers a greater geographical and/or temporal extent than a single team of scientists would be able to cover alone, provides important insight into species diversity, abundance, and behavior over time [8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

“…Maintaining a successful program also requires that researchers continually evaluate program outcomes, including measuring the recruitment and retention of volunteers, understanding volunteer interests and demographics, and considering the quality and quantity of data collected [14,18]. Project evaluation can inform subsequent changes to the project that allow researchers to ensure their goals are met, in addition to supporting the community in which the project is based [10][11][12].…”

“…We established a citizen science program during the pandemic, with over 1000 sightings reported to date, a group of registered volunteers, and an educational outreach component reaching over 12 local schools [39]. Evaluating citizen science programs is challenging, but vital to continued success of projects [11,12,14]. By monitoring traffic to our websites and observing trends in sightings, we were able to identify strategies that worked with respect to…”

Documenting butterflies with the help of citizen science in Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya, India

“…The only benefit that the participants of these CS projects have is the opportunity to contribute to the world of science, public information and conservation (Silvertown 2009). Thus, CS projects that require large sample sizes must assess and understand the shared interest and unique motivations that drive their target citizen scientists to participate (Rotman et al 2012;Wright et al 2015), and also find means to incite motivation in them to participate (Schulwitz et al 2021). This is where CS outreach comes into play.…”

“…This is where CS outreach comes into play. CS outreach brings in interested people under one platform and enables them to potentially participate in data collection (Silvertown 2009;Schulwitz et al 2021). However, effectiveness of CS outreach needs to be tested rigorously in different fields of research, in different localities, and in studies involving different groups of participating volunteers.…”