Participants’ motivations to contribute to biodiversity citizen science projects

Maryam Lotfian; Jens Ingensand; Olivier Ertz; Sarah Composto; Mathias Oberson; Simon Oulevay; David Campisi; Florent Joerin

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.27198v1

Participants’ motivations to contribute to biodiversity citizen science projects

Maryam Lotfian ¹, Jens Ingensand ¹, Olivier Ertz², Sarah Composto¹, Mathias Oberson², Simon Oulevay², David Campisi², Florent Joerin³

1 GIS-Lab, School of Engineering and Management Vaud, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Yverdon les-Bains, Switzerland

2 University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Media Engineering Institute, Yverdon les-Bains, Switzerland

3 Faculty of Geosciences and Environment, UNIL, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.27198v1

Published: 2018-09-13
Accepted: 2018-09-13

Subject Areas: Bioinformatics, Social Computing, Spatial and Geographic Information Systems
Keywords: Motivations, Citizen Science, Questionnaire, Biodiversity, Mobile Application

Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Lotfian M, Ingensand J, Ertz O, Composto S, Oberson M, Oulevay S, Campisi D, Joerin F. 2018. Participants’ motivations to contribute to biodiversity citizen science projects. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27198v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27198v1

Abstract

The public participation in scientific projects (citizen science) is significantly increasing specially with technology developments in recent years. Volunteers play an essential role in citizen science projects, therefore understanding their motivations, and understanding how to sustain them to keep contributing to the project are of utmost importance. This paper presents the analysis of volunteers’ characteristics and their motivations to contribute to a citizen science project, which aims at encouraging citizens to take action for biodiversity. The results from the online survey illustrate that people are more motivated by intrinsic nature-related motives rather than extrinsic motivations.

Author Comment

This submission is intended for the OGRS'2018 Collection