“…Looking at the volunteering literature more broadly, citizen science initiatives have a great potential to benefit individuals' physical and mental health. Insights from the behavioural sciences show that if individuals enjoy an activity, understand the problems and associated solutions, have a sense of agency, and have a positive attitude towards a socio-environmental issue, they are more likely to continue that activity (i.e., increasing retention of volunteers) and engage in related behaviours (e.g., perform other pro-environmental behaviours; see Gifford and Nilsson, 2014;Kruse et al, 2020b;Oturai et al, 2022). Thus, assessing and understanding if or how these initiatives could affect behaviour would help maximize retention of participants within the initiative itself; increase experience and knowledge among the citizen scientists, further improving the quality of the data collected; and could have a broader impact by encouraging pro-environmental behaviours in other contexts.…”