Abstract
BackgroundNatural history has a long tradition in the UK, dating back to before Charles Darwin. Developing from a principally amateur pursuit, natural history continues to attract both amateur and professional involvement. Within the context of citizen science and public engagement, we examine the motivations behind citizen participation in the national survey activities of the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) programme, looking at: people’s experiences of the surveys as ‘project-based leisure’; their motivations for taking part and barriers to continued participation; where they feature on our continuum of engagement; and whether participation in an OPAL survey facilitated their movement between categories along this continuum. The paper focuses on a less-expected but very significant outcome regarding the participation of already-engaged amateur naturalists in citizen science.ResultsOur main findings relate to: first, how committed amateur naturalists (already-engaged) have also enjoyed contributing to OPAL and the need to respect and work with their interest to encourage broader and deeper involvement; and second, how new (previously-unengaged) and relatively new participants (casually-engaged) have gained confidence, renewed their interests, refocussed their activities and/or gained validation from participation in OPAL. Overall, we argue that engagement with and enthusiasm for the scientific process is a motivation shared by citizens who, prior to participating in the OPAL surveys, were previously-unengaged, casually-engaged or already-engaged in natural history activities.ConclusionsCitizen science has largely been written about by professional scientists for professional scientists interested in developing a project of their own. This study offers a qualitative example of how citizen science can be meaningful to participants beyond what might appear to be a public engagement data collection exercise.
Highlights
Natural history has a long tradition in the UK, dating back to before Charles Darwin
We argue that citizen science activities, such as Open Air Laboratories (OPAL), form a major part of project-based leisure, whereby people are asked to participate in a scientific project that responds to either a pressing scientific question or urgent environmental challenge
The previously‐unengaged participants Feedback from OPAL participants reveals that the programme succeeded in engaging many people who previously had had no involvement with natural history
Summary
Natural history has a long tradition in the UK, dating back to before Charles Darwin. Citizen scientists have been heralded as one solution to a crisis of monitoring and shortage of data in the field [2,3,4,5,6]. Notwithstanding other monitoring activities, the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is widely regarded as the first ‘citizen science’ exercise in the field of natural history, Since the mid-1930s, volunteer naturalists– rather than professional taxonomists—have formed an ‘army of new recorders’ [10] recruited by initiatives such as the British Trust for Ornithology’s Nest Record Scheme and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Big Garden Birdwatch. With millions of people contributing to such schemes on an annual basis [2], a recent report regarding the state of UK taxonomy stated that: ‘The voluntary sector, with its core of expert amateur naturalists, is an important repository of taxonomic expertise. The volunteers monitor changes in their local fauna and flora, provide records for biological recording schemes, and generate data for Biodiversity Action Plans’ [7]
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