Citizen science has the potential to provide participants with information about conservation issues and to encourage additional conservation actions. In this case study, we describe the current state of conservation education among butterfly citizen science projects in the United States. To determine the extent to which these citizen science projects are promoting an understanding of, and engagement in, conservation among their participants, we used an online questionnaire to census project leaders and assessed their websites for the presence of educational conservation information. We found that the majority (91%, n = 22) of butterfly citizen science projects in the United States include a conservation focus, and that they are educating their participants about key conservation threats and action strategies. Many are also using personal appeals, behavioral incentives, and the social interactions among participants to encourage their participants to engage in butterfly conservation outside the project. We found room for improvement on educating participants, especially about indirect conservation opportunities such as financial donations and outreach activities. We also suggest more widespread and effective use of project websites to disseminate conservation information.Keywords: conservation education; pro-environmental behavior; public participation in scientific research; engagement
IntroductionCitizen science is an increasingly common conservation tool, with participants playing a key role in biological monitoring (e.g., Devictor et al. 2010;Dickinson et al. 2012). However, nature-based citizen science has the potential to play an even larger role in conservation by educating and encouraging participants to engage in conservation activities outside of their citizen science projects. Many citizen science programs study or directly address conservation concerns, making conservation education and the promotion of conservation actions a natural part of training and educating participants.Volunteer participants can play a number of roles in citizen science, ranging from data collectors to project creators and administrators, depending on both the project and the individual (Bonney et al. 2009). Here, we primarily focus on the education and engagement of volunteers outside the project leadership structure, such as those who collect and report data. Figure 1 depicts the ways that nature-based citizen science projects can influence their volunteers' transitions from participating in citizen science (left box) to engaging in conservation actions outside the project (right box). First, volunteers can interact with a project in three key ways (left box). For many volunteers, the primary interaction with their citizen science project is through collecting and submitting data. Additionally, many projects offer initial or periodic training events, either in person or via print and online materials. Projects also can provide their volunteers with educational content that is not strictly related to data collection or train...