Citizen science and anthropogenic litter monitoring: impacts on knowledge build-up, on participants and in society

Abstract

Growing concern about anthropogenic litter pollution has resulted in an increase in citizen science projects on litter monitoring with a great variety in goals, monitoring protocols and collected data. This paper presents an evaluation of eleven citizen science projects performing anthropogenic litter monitoring in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. An eight-point evaluation framework was constructed, with five points describing the set-up of the project  and 3 points describing their impact on science, participant and society. The framework was used to evaluate the projects, using desk top research and semi-structured qualitative interviews with organizers and participants of selected projects as input. Results show that scientific impact is greatly influenced by the robustness of the monitoring protocol. In general, the projects attract participants that are very aware of the problem and the possibility to do something about it with likeminded people is an important driver to participate. The following characteristics of projects were found to contribute to societal impacts: (1) societal change stated as main project goal, (2) collaborations with other institutions and (3) participants who perform more activities besides the monitoring. Here, robust scientific data is important to provide evidence for policy formulation, but for other societal changes other pathways like social network championing, political advocacy and community action become relevant. The framework could be used for evaluating other projects in the field of environmental monitoring and by anyone who wishes to improve the impacts of their citizen science project.