68 Johnson et al.: Why Count Trees? Volunteer Motivations and Experiences with Tree Monitoring ing themes of Fun, Explore, and Past Experience, and lowest for interviewees mentioning Incentive, while the most common themes mentioned were Past Experience, Social / Meet People, and Values. For interviewees, themes mentioned during time 1 (assessment) and time 2 (interview) were also examined. Table 7 identifies these combined results. For most interviewees, themes were con- sistent between both times. However, of particular note is a higher initial mention only (during the assessment) by some of the 40 interviewees for Values (n = 11), Educate (n = 9), Contribute (n = 7), and Fun (n = 7). At the same time, the deeper discussion of interviews and more time and experience with volunteering led to more elicitations of Past Experience (n = 18 in inter- view only) and Social (n = 17 in interview only). Researchers did not include the theme Explore in this table, as it only emerged during interviews. DISCUSSION From this study, one finds support that citizen science volunteers are motivated by a desire to improve the community, as well as individual benefits related to volunteerism. Motivations iden- tified by TC2015 participants differed somewhat from motivations by tree planters under a previ- ous long-term tree-planting program managed by NYC Parks, MillionTreesNYC (Fisher et al. 2015). Researchers find a similar focus on caring Table 6. Themes of TC2015 motivations from interviews (n = 40). Theme Proportion of interviewees Past Experience Social / Meet People Values Contribute Explore Outdoors Educate / Learning Fun / Enjoyment Incentive 55% 48% 38% 23% 23% 15% 10% 5% 5% Average blocks mapped 147 58 21 85 256 50 36 69 15 for the city and deepening social ties, yet for citi- zen scientists there is more of an overt desire for learning, education, and exploration. Given the rise of citizen-science opportunities, alongside an existing emphasis on community education by environmental volunteer groups (Measham and Barnett 2008), the potential exists to appeal to both community-focused and self-directed mo- tivations. Future research could dig deeper into the learning aspect of these volunteers and also explore the links between the citizen-science mo- tivations identified here with civic motivations identified by participants, to compare against this prior work with tree planters (Fisher et al. 2015). Motivations identified by tree-monitoring vol- unteers are similar to motivations identified by environmental volunteers and citizen scientists in previous studies, with a few exceptions. Similar to Bruyere and Rappe (2007), volunteers identified wanting to contribute back to their community, spend time outdoors, holding environmental val- ues, having fun, having previous experience, and being social/meet people. The desire to learn and self-educate was also a common theme, which aligns with motivations identified in other citizen- science research (e.g., Wright et al. 2015; Dom- roese and Johnson 2017). Distinct from previous research, a theme of external incentives identified the presence of a particular recruitment campaign involving free tickets to an Afropunk concert. Median blocks mapped 36 17 10 29 77 16 19 69 15 Minimum blocks mapped 1 1 1 2 4 2 2 17 4 Table 7. Comparison between motivations mentioned in initial assessment and in interviews (n = 40). Contribute Both Initial only Interview only Not identified Number of interviewees 26 7 6 1 40 Educate 28 9 2 1 40 Fun 30 7 2 1 40 Incentive 37 2 0 1 40 Outdoors 33 1 5 1 40 Past experience 20 0 18 2 40 Maximum blocks mapped 1,109 377 78 352 1,109 211 102 120 25 Social 21 0 17 2 40 Values 24 11 5 0 40 ©2018 International Society of Arboriculture
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