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Browsing by Author "Solomon, Jennifer, advisor"

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    Harnessing rock climbers for bat conservation: understanding the barriers and benefits for rock climbers to engage in citizen science
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Gross, Emily, author; Solomon, Jennifer, advisor; Abrams, Katie, committee member; Davis, Shawn, committee member; Schorr, Rob, committee member
    Citizen science is a valuable tool for crowdsourcing data, yet it remains underutilized at the nexus of conservation and recreation. The value of citizen science lies in its ability to expand the scope of research by reducing financial burden, increasing data collection over time, and tapping into a diverse pool of skillsets from individuals. Recreators, in particular, can broaden the extent of the project in new ways. Extreme sports participants emerge as a key subgroup of recreators due to their additional specialized skills, knowledge, and daring prowess. This research focuses on one such community of extreme sport participants— rock climbers. Rock climbers are distinguished by their ability to navigate and collect data from vertical environments that remain inaccessible to many biologists. The potential of collaboration is timely, as bats are facing unprecedented threats from white-nose syndrome, wind energy, habitat loss, and climate change. Thus, this research aims to (1) uncover the barriers and motivations for rock climbers to participate in a citizen science initiative called Climbers for Bat Conservation (CBC), (2) explore the relevance of environmental attitudes and knowledge of the organization on climber engagement, and (3) suggest strategies to increase the likelihood of reporting a bat to CBC, utilizing the Community-Based Social Marketing framework. Data for this project was collected using mixed methods, including two sets of semi-structured interviews and a structured survey. Semi-structured interviews were conducted at a rock climbing festival, Rocktoberfest, in Red River Gorge, Kentucky and through the video chat platform, Teams. Results from the semi-structured interviews were used to inform the structured survey. The survey was administered to climbers at Rocktoberfest and to an online database of climbers who reported seeing a bat to CBC. In Chapter 1. I present and discuss the semi-structured interviews, which revealed diverse motivations for participation, including knowledge and experiences with bats, the role of the climbing community, and the complexities of navigating climbing access and conservation. Results of the survey are discussed in Chapter 2., revealing the importance of situational barriers (time, forgetting, and fear of losing access), as well as highlighting the key role that the climbing community plays in influencing behavior. Results also revealed that accurate knowledge of CBC did not have a significant impact on the reporting behavior. It could be that the larger influence on the reporting behavior comes from environmental attitudes, as the results showed that climbers who reported to CBC had a significantly higher proportion of individuals who held pro-environmental attitudes as compared to climbers who had not reported. Both reporting and non-reporting climbers valued the ecological benefits of reporting a bat, highlighting a key topic that can be utilized in future message framing. These findings build upon the growing body of research that demonstrates knowledge alone does not change behavior. This is important for citizen science organizations seeking to utilize rock climbers because many climbers are guided by ecological motivations in tandem with the fear of losing access. My research suggests that acknowledging tradeoffs regarding management of climbing routes and bat conservation while maintaining transparency about how the data will be used will likely aid in recruitment and retention of climber volunteers. Results of this research may aid future citizen science projects in beginning a social marketing campaign for organizations with limited time, budget, and/or staff availability, while shedding light on the motivations of rock climbers to participate in pro-environmental behaviors.
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    Using systems approaches to understand women's conservation leadership and urban residents' wildscape behavior
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Jones, Megan Siobhán, author; Solomon, Jennifer, advisor; Teel, Tara L., advisor; Gavin, Michael, committee member; Martinez, Doreen E., committee member
    This dissertation seeks to investigate a fundamental question in the field of conservation science: How do we build and sustain capacity for conservation leadership and action to protect biodiversity in a changing world? Worldwide, conservation practitioners seek to make conservation accessible to more people embedded in highly variable social-ecological contexts, but their efforts are often hindered by the characteristics of the systems (e.g. communities, institutions) they are embedded within. Fulfilling the aspirations of conservation will require broader participation from a greater diversity and number of conservation actors. Achieving this expansion of the conservation community will depend on our ability to understand how individuals' actions and leadership are nested within the broader systems that these individuals respond to and seek to reshape. In the three studies of this dissertation I therefore seek to understand the behavior and motivations of conservation leaders and actors through a systems approach, by investigating the experiences of different groups of practitioners who challenge and reconfigure the inherited model of how conservation occurs. In my first two research studies I explore the experiences of women, one of many groups that have historically been excluded from and marginalized in leadership positions. Specifically, I investigate women conservation leaders' perceptions of professional gender-related and motherhood-related challenges and supports. In Chapter 2 I find that women in conservation leadership in the United States experience at least six categories of gender-related challenges over their careers, which fall more heavily on different women based on race, ethnicity, age, and seniority. I find further that women navigate those challenges with the help of structural and relational supports. In Chapter 3 I examine how the intersection of motherhood and conservation leadership creates a series of choices for individual women, and that these choices are constrained or enabled by the families, organizations, and profession within which they work and live. In my final research study, reported in Chapter 4, I investigate the factors motivating urban residents who are expanding the scope of conservation leadership through voluntary engagement in and advocacy for wildscape gardening on their properties and in their communities. I determine that residents participating in an urban conservation program engage in many different, interconnected wildscaping behaviors, and are motivated to do so by a variety of individual and collective factors. My findings further suggest that these factors change over time in response to feedbacks from the impacts that wildscape gardeners' actions have on a complex multilevel social-ecological system. The findings from these studies shed light on how conservation can benefit from systems approaches to become a more sustainable and inclusive movement in different contexts, so as to better fulfill its vision of protecting equitable, biodiverse social-ecological systems.