Implementing and evaluating a citizen-science program to support wildlife management: MI-MAST: Implementing Citizen-science Programs

Citizen science is increasingly being used by natural resource professionals to monitor the environment at large spatial or temporal extents. Developing, initiating, and sustaining an effective citizen-science program requires careful planning, marketing, and engagement. We describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of a citizen-science program for quantifying mast production (called MI-MAST: Wildlife Food Tracker), and offer recommendations on marketing, recruitment of volunteers, and ways to sustain programs. In 2014, MI-MAST was introduced to approximately 150 potential participants to test technology and capabilities of volunteers. In 2015, we worked with project partners to market MI-MAST to approximately 500 additional potential participants throughout Michigan, USA. From 2014 to 2017, 510 people registered for a MI-MAST account, but only 57 people submitted data. On average, each person that submitted data entered 4 instances of mast production. We randomly field-validated 60 mast observations submitted by 15 different participants throughout the study region and found that 100% of the plant species were correctly identified and 97% of the records describing mast amounts were accurate. The majority (61%) of registered users listed hunting as a primary outdoor interest. Interactions with participants revealed that using MI-MAST to evaluate mast production on their own property was a primary attraction for enrollment and participation. We recommend that effective citizen-science programs are marketed to provide personal benefits and tangible outputs to individual users. We found the biggest challenges facing a natural resource agency implementing a citizen-science program to be recruitment and retention of participants across spatial and temporal extents that are ecologically meaningful. (C) 2018 The Wildlife Society.