EAGER: Determinants of citizen science participation and data quality in coastal water quality monitoring

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Citizen science-based approaches to monitoring environmental quality are increasingly being deployed. This study seeks to understand what characteristics of citizen science volunteers will predict their effective and long-term participation in this type of study. Growing interest in the potential benefits of citizen science has been accompanied by an increasing focus on technological tools to ensure high quality participation and data validity. In the case of water quality monitoring, the health and quality of the environment being monitored could have very real implications for its use by the volunteers themselves. Better knowledge of the motivations of volunteers, commitments, or abilities could lead to simpler, more reliable strategies (including study design or participant recruitment and training) for ensuring data validity than a technological approach might. Through an exploratory study of participants in a coastal water quality monitoring program, this project will test the hypothesis that citizen science participants, who are more vested in the resource they volunteer to monitor, will generate more reliable, valid data for use in scientific research.This study's mixed method design draws upon and integrates diverse theoretical literatures on local ecological knowledge, place attachment, and citizen science-based environmental monitoring. In so doing, the proposed work addresses a fundamental gap in knowledge about the effectiveness of the participation of citizen scientists and the quality of their data collected by citizen science is influenced by the citizen scientists' relationship to the environmental resource they volunteer to study. The present study will use citizen volunteers to map the spatial extent of freshwater plumes from two watershed outlets along the central coast of California: San Pedro Creek and San Lorenzo River. Both watershed outlets, discharge adjacent to popular beaches and surf spots. In the Mediterranean climate of California, urban and stormwater runoff represents one of the most important sources of pollution to the coastal ocean. Unlike many other citizen science activities that recruit volunteers to complete research tasks online, coastal water quality monitoring citizen science programs provide for the circumstance in which volunteers may be personally vested in the findings of the research?that is, through their physical use of the place or resource or through their health and wellbeing. . This proposed research seeks to fill this data and knowledge gap by testing the hypothesis that participants who are more vested in the resource they volunteer to monitor will contribute more reliable, valid data to citizen science projects. As environmental quality monitoring efforts increasingly rely on citizen science to collect data, these insights will inform study design and volunteer recruitment and training, as well as suggest approaches for public engagement with and education in science generally. It is anticipated that findings from this study will lead to actionable recommendations for improving the design and deployment of other citizen science-based research projects in the future.