Rock climbers demonstrate value-driven motivations for engaging in citizen science for bat conservation

Specialized recreators, such as rock climbers, contribute citizen science observations of rare wildlife species from largely inaccessible landscapes. Still, motivations to contribute opportunistic records to citizen science for species conservation remain underexplored. Utilizing a mixed-methods design, we employed semi-structured interviews (n = 28), member-checking workshops (n = 11), and Q-methodology (n = 11) to trace motivational pathways to the benefits rock climbers anticipate when reporting evidence of a bat to Climbers for Bat Conservation. We identified five pathways including ecological, science, community, access, and incentive-based motivations. Four of the pathways could link to access benefits, highlighting a variety of motives outside of egoism driving the reporting behavior. Across pathways, values-based benefits outweighed incentives. These results suggest that aligning recruitment and retention strategies with pathway-specific, values-based messaging can strengthen climber recruitment and retention in citizen science to improve conservation outcomes.