Understanding the Determinants of Volunteer Retention ThroughCapture-Recapture Analysis: Answering Social Science QuestionsUsing a Wildlife Ecology Toolkit

摘要

Scientists and conservationists increasingly rely on contributions by volunteersrecruited from the wider public to work over large and ecologically meaningfulspatial scales. Optimizing working in partnership with unpaid, volunteercitizen scientists and conservationists requires an understanding of the determinantsof volunteer retention rates and how they are affected by managementpractices. To this effect, we present the novel use of the mark-recaptureframework widely used in wildlife demography in order to quantify volunteerretention probabilities. We illustrate the versatility and power of the approachusing a project that removed invasive American mink from 10,000 km2 inScotland in partnership with volunteer citizen conservationists recruited fromlocal communities. Wide scale adoption of the mark-recapture framework toanalyze volunteer management will give novel insights into how volunteersinteract with the conservation projects they are involved in and provide evidencefor their optimal management.