Attitudes Toward Engagement in Citizen Science Increase Self-Related, Ecology-Related, and Motivation-Related Outcomes in an Urban Wildlife Project.

Citizen science projects are crucial for engaging citizens in conservation efforts. Although attitudes toward engagement in citizen science were mostly considered an outcome of citizen science participation, citizens may also have a certain attitude toward engagement in citizen science when starting with a citizen science project. Moreover, there is a lack of citizen science studies that consider changes over longer periods of time. Therefore, in this research, we present two-wave data from four field studies of a citizen science project about urban wildlife ecology using cross-lagged panel analyses. We investigated the influence of attitudes toward engagement in citizen science on self-related, ecology-related, and motivation-related outcomes. We found that positive attitudes toward engagement in citizen science at the beginning of the project had positive influences on the participants' psychological ownership and pride in their participation, their attitudes toward and enthusiasm about wildlife, and their internal and external motivation 2 months later. We discuss the implications for citizen science research and practice.

Promoting scientific literacy in evolution through citizen science.

Evolutionary understanding is central to biology. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding and making informed decisions about societal issues such as climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gather new data and promote scientific literacy, is one strategy through which people could learn about evolution. However, despite the potential for citizen science to promote evolution learning opportunities, very few projects implement them. In this paper, we make the case for incorporating evolution education into citizen science, define key learning goals, and suggest opportunities for designing and evaluating projects in order to promote scientific literacy in evolution.

I'm fine with collecting data: Engagement profiles differ depending on scientific activities in an online community of a citizen science project.

Digital technologies facilitate collaboration between citizens and scientists in citizen science (CS) projects. Besides the facilitation of data transmission and access, digital technologies promote novel formats for education in CS by including citizens in the process of collecting, analyzing, and discussing data. It is usually assumed that citizens profit more from CS the more they participate in the different steps of the scientific process. However, it has so far not been analyzed whether citizens actually engage in these steps. Therefore, we investigated citizens' actual engagement in different scientific steps online (i.e., data collection and data analysis) in two field studies of a CS project. We then compared them with other CS projects. We analyzed behavioral engagement patterns of N = 273 participants with activity logs and cluster analyses. Opportunities to engage in different steps of the scientific process increased participants' overall commitment compared to contributory CS projects. Yet, despite their increased commitment, participants' engagement was only more active for data collection but not for data analysis. We discuss how participants' perceived role as data collectors influenced their actual engagement in the scientific steps. To conclude, citizens may need support to change their role from data collectors to data inquirers.