[Coral-List] European Coral Reef Symposium: The role of citizen science in marine conservation?

[ansvercammen at gmail.com]

Dear all,

I would like to submit a proposal for either a workshop or a conference session for the ECRS in Oxford, 13-15 December 2017, focusing on the role of citizen science in marine conservation. I am approaching this from the perspective of a social scientist; my personal interest is in conservation psychology, more specifically, factors influencing people’s motivations to volunteer, the perceived benefits and the extent to which satisfaction or commitment predicts volunteers’ productivity and retention in a programme. But I would love to tackle this from a multi-disciplinary angle and get experts together who may have different objectives, different approaches and different expected outputs/outcomes from citizen science. My view is to use the session to synthesise experiences, to derive “lessons learnt” and help formulate recommendations to improve effectiveness of these kinds of programmes.

At this point, I am just gauging interest in the overall topic of citizen science and would love to hear from anyone who would like to get involved as a speaker/panel member. The hard deadline is 15 February, and any interested parties are invited to send me an email expressing their (provisional) interest in contributing, and – if possible – a proposed title for their talk, as soon as possible.

I should note that there is no specific funding for travel/registration associated with this proposal.

Thanks in advance.

Best wishes,

Ans Vercammen

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ans-vercammen-00b35587 
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ans_Vercammen