Creating advocates for mammal conservation through citizen science

Citizen science initiatives have shown promise to provide informal education about nature and conservation and simultaneously gather scientific data at large scales. eMammal is a platform for citizen science projects that recruits volunteers to place camera traps that collect data in the form of wildlife photographs. Our project offered informal education on wildlife ecology and conservation to volunteers through training materials, feedback during the project, and a natural history blog. We tested whether our education efforts and volunteer activities affected their project specific skills, wildlife knowledge, conservation attitudes, and what kind of information they shared with their social network. Volunteers accurately (> 90%) identified 15 of 20 wildlife species captured in the photos and reduced the rejection rate of camera placements over time. Our surveys showed that volunteer's attitudes toward conservation were high before joining the project and did not change after participating. However, volunteer knowledge of wildlife was higher after working with eMammal. Volunteers also became advocates for mammal conservation by sharing their new knowledge. Roughly half of our volunteers reported actively discussing some type of information related to wildlife both before (50%) and after (54%) the project. However, after volunteering they were 84% more likely to discuss local mammals or local mammal conservation. The likelihood of discussing local mammals was positively influenced by the number of predator photos captured by volunteers, showing that the type of experience can influence how information is spread through a volunteer's social network. Citizen science can connect people to the natural world while simultaneously providing reliable data for conservation.