Accurate species identification is fundamental to biodiversity science, but the natural history skills required for this are neglected in formal education at all levels. In this paper we describe how the web application ispotnature.org and its sister site ispot.org.za (collectively, “iSpot”) are helping to solve this problem by combining learning technology with crowdsourcing to connect beginners with experts. Over 94% of observations submitted to iSpot receive a determination. External checking of a sample of 3,287 iSpot records verified > 92% of them. To mid 2014, iSpot crowdsourced the identification of 30,000 taxa (>80% at species level) in > 390,000 observations with a global community numbering > 42,000 registered participants. More than half the observations on ispotnature.org were named within an hour of submission. iSpot uses a unique, 9-dimensional reputation system to motivate and reward participants and to verify determinations. Taxon-specific reputation points are earned when a participant proposes an identification that achieves agreement from other participants, weighted by the agreers’ own reputation scores for the taxon. This system is able to discriminate effectively between competing determinations when two or more are proposed for the same observation. In 57% of such cases the reputation system improved the accuracy of the determination, while in the remainder it either improved precision (e.g. by adding a species name to a genus) or revealed false precision, for example where a determination to species level was not supported by the available evidence. We propose that the success of iSpot arises from the structure of its social network that efficiently connects beginners and experts, overcoming the social as well as geographic barriers that normally separate the two.
Adult survival rates were estimated in field populations of domestic Drosophila species by means of multiple capture-recapture experiments. Micronized fluorescent dusts were used as marking agents and analysis used the Fisher-Ford model: the assumptions of this model are justified using evidence from this study and the literature. Survival rates were commonly 0.45-0.85 per day, suggesting that mean life expectancy for adult flies is from 1.3 to 6.2 days in natural populations. No consistent differences in survival between sexes or seasons were demonstrated. The implications of low natural survival rates are discussed.
1) This paper describes a simulation model which predicts the guild size o flies living on a divided and ephemeral resource, without any traditional resource partitioning.(2) A distribution of empirical guild sizes was obtained from fifty-three field studies collected from all over the world. The resource bases used by the flies were fruit, fungi, sap fluxes, decaying leaves and flowers. The modal guild size was seven.(3) An acceptable range of parameter values for the model was obtained from a combination of field and laboratory experiments. Within this range the model predicted distributions of guild sizes slightly less than those observed in the field, with a modal siz which varied between five and six.
INTRODUCTIONMany animals, particularly insects such as drosophilids, exploit resources which are divided into small, discrete and ephemeral patches, such as dung, carrion, fruit, decaying leaves, flowers, fungi and dead wood. Frequently, such sites support large numbers of
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