Promoting Sustainable Moves in a Citizen Science Projects and Correlate Volunteers’ Motivations with their Ongoing Status
Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) is a citizen science project based in University of Washington. COASST trains coastal residents to conduct monthly surveys and collect data from bird tagging. My main job working for COASST is to find alternatives to replace current plastic zip ties used in bird tagging. Because currently, the plastic zip ties used in bird tagging is not biodegradable and thus they do serious harms to the marine ecosystem. As a result, a sustainable alternative is needed. And after 3-month trails consisted of online researches, internal tests and external test, I found biodegradable flagging tapes to be the best option to replace the plastic zip ties and the best alternative to COASST to carry forward in the future. In addition, besides looking for alternatives to replace current plastic zip ties in bird tagging, I also did a social science research with COASST researchers. I took a look at current COASST volunteers’ motivations when they first joined COASST and tried to find relationships between their motivations and their ongoing status. And the result is that volunteers who mentioned words like “monitor” and “conserve” spent more time conducting surveys and remained more active compared to other volunteers. This finding really helped COASST as they now could improve their ways to recruit my reliable volunteers by targeting people who would love to monitor and conserve the beach.