Trusting land to volunteers: How and why land trusts involve volunteers in ecological monitoring

Land trusts play an increasingly important role in conservation both in terms of the magnitude of conservation activities in which they participate and the total proportion of all conservation that they represent. Making informed conservation management decisions and local community engagement are two critical problems facing operators of locally-owned protected areas including those managed by land trusts. Engaging volunteers for critical management needs, such as collecting ecological data, is one way to overcome the challenge of managing and monitoring resources as a small organization. Partnering with volunteers can also help achieve other conservation goals including educational outreach and increasing public support. Land trusts that engage in volunteer-based monitoring (VBM) provide an opportunity to study how citizen science activities can contribute to conservation in practice. We surveyed land trust organizations across the United States to learn about their VBM programs. We received survey responses 332 organization, 133 of which maintain VBM programs. We found that the majority of land trusts with VBM programs are small organizations with less than ten employees (79.1%), few volunteers (50.4% with <10 volunteers, 87.2% with <50 volunteers), and little funding dedicated to the volunteer management (70.9% with <$1000 annually). Volunteers collect data on a wide variety of monitoring targets including vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant species, as well as water, soil and air quality measurements. Volunteers also engage in many different stages of the monitoring process including data collection, entry and analysis, and even dissemination of results. While increasing civic engagement and educational outreach were reported as the most important motivations for land trusts to engage in VBM, organizations reported that increasing civic engagement is the most difficult benefit to achieve. These results have implications for how land trusts can use citizen science and other participatory approaches to engage volunteers for conservation actions and increase public engagement. This study also shows that scientists interested in citizen science may engage with land trusts to learn about the potential for citizen science to improve conservation management.