27 NOV 2025 (THU) 15:35 - 16:05

Public participation in urban tree health citizen science: an integrated cognitive–environmental framework

Ms PENG Chen  

( Supervisor: Prof Wendy Y Chen )

Abstract:

The increasing frequency of biotic and abiotic disturbances is directly undermining the health of urban trees and substantially raising the potential risk of economic, social, and environmental losses. It has therefore become urgent to conduct comprehensive and timely monitoring of tree health. As an efficient data collection paradigm, citizen science (CS) has been widely recognised worldwide as an effective tool for tree health monitoring. Despite its great potential, existing tree health CS projects are still facing the critical limitation of insufficient public participation. Current research offers limited insight into the factors that influence citizens to participate in tree health monitoring. This highlights the necessity of establishing a systematic framework to investigate the factors determining why the public chooses to participate or decline to participate in those projects. Such a framework is vital for participant recruitment and therefore ensuring project sustainability. 

This study emphasises that previous research on participation in environmental CS has rarely focused on the antecedent variables that shape motivation, particularly the psychological and cognitive antecedents of motivational formation. In addition, during the promotion of CS participation, cognitive and social biases, such as the shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) in perceptions of biological conditions, can complicate decision making and may lead to divergent conservation targets. These issues are highly relevant to public participation, yet such assumptions have never been directly tested in the context of CS participation. If the influence of long term exposure to community environments on people’s perception and evaluation of tree health is overlooked, differences in reporting motivations may be inadequately understood. 

To address these limitations and provide valuable insights for effectively recruiting the public into tree health monitoring, this study aims to integrate individual psychological cognitions with perceptions of the natural environment under environmental exposure, from the perspective of environmental psychology. Combining field surveys, questionnaire surveys, and remote sensing data, the empirical analysis will employ partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), regression analysis, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to investigate the driving factors and constraints affecting public participation in urban tree health monitoring. 

The overall objectives of this study are: (1) Construct a theoretical model for analysing the factors influencing participation in tree health CS by integrating new dimensions such as objective environmental conditions, psychological cognition, and environmental perception; (2) at the level of individual psychological cognition, to examine how emotions and cognitions related to urban trees and the environment affect public participation in tree health monitoring; (3) at the social level, to investigate the public’s baseline perceptions of tree health under environmental exposure and how these baselines influence participation in tree health monitoring; and (4) to analyse the characteristics of participants from different types of communities in order to develop more fine-grained participant profiles and corresponding targeted intervention strategies.