New Publication

Citizen science observations have become a cornerstone for documenting climate change and conservation efforts. In this article, just published in Conservation Letters, we explore whether citizen observations could be influenced by explicit incentives (in this case, a prize competition). By comparing data from the two largest German online platforms for wildlife observations, we show that a prize competition increases the number of reported observations by about 10%, but at the same time reduces the diversity of reported observations. Our study thus provides important initial evidence that policy makers could use explicit incentives to motivate and target citizen observations.