What people learn from death: exploring citizen scientists’ learning outcomes in Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network from an environmental education perspective

Abstract

Citizen science is a key approach in scientific research that involves crowdsourced data collection for environmental monitoring and conservation. Participants in citizen science can gain scientific knowledge, change their pro-environmental attitude and behavior. Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network (TaiRON) was founded in 2011 and has a community of approximately 20,000 members. To collect data for further biological research, participants adopt a simple approach: taking pictures of roadkill and uploading them to a database. While many studies have explored citizen science learning outcomes, this study examines how a program with a unique participant task – photographing road kill – has an impact on participants pro-environmental learning. The learning outcome with the largest change was environmental attitude, suggesting that the participants’ feelings, awareness, and values regarding the environment changed after joining TaiRON. The reasons for the attitude changes could be attributed to the characteristics of TaiRON’s work: participants collect data from animal carcasses, prompting them to reflect deeply on the value of life. The second key learning outcome was behavioural intention, which means participants were driven to action to mitigate roadkill occurrence. Our results provide an example of evaluating learning outcomes in citizen science and also contribute to promoting environmental literacy.

Keywords:

• Citizen science
• environmental attitude
• learning outcome
• Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network
• evaluation

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Wei-Ta Fang, Shiang-Yao Liu, Yi-Ju Yang, Ruey-Shing Lin, and Dau-Jye Lu for their helpful comments on this study. We appreciate Chi-Chang Liu for his negative criticism which we could have the motivation to write this paper. We are also grateful to the respondents and interviewees, as well as all the members of TaiRON, for their contribution to data collection for better roadkill reduction. Furthermore, we thank the editor and reviewer for their useful feedback. This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (National Science and Technology Council), Taiwan, and the projects were written by Hsu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chia-Hsuan Hsu

Chia-Hsuan Hsu is a Junior Research Associate at Biodiversity Division, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan.

Te-En Lin

Te-En Lin is an Associate Researcher at Endemic Species Research Institute, Taiwan.