Boosting biodiversity monitoring using smartphone-driven, rapidly accumulating community-sourced data

Abstract

Ecosystem services, which derive in part from biological diversity, are a fundamental support for human society. However, human activities are causing harm to biodiversity, ultimately endangering these critical ecosystem services. Halting nature loss and mitigating these impacts necessitates comprehensive biodiversity distribution data, a requirement for implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. To efficiently collect species observations from the public, we launched the ‘ Biome ’ mobile application in Japan. By employing species identification algorithms and gamification elements, the app has gathered >6M observations since its launch in 2019. However, community-sourced data often exhibit spatial and taxonomic biases. Species distribution models (SDMs) enable infer species distribution while accommodating such bias. We investigated Biome data’s quality and how incorporating the data influences the performance of SDMs. Species identification accuracy exceeds 95% for birds, reptiles, mammals, and amphibians, but seed plants, molluscs, and fishes scored below 90%. The distributions of 132 terrestrial plants and animals across Japan were modeled, and their accuracy was improved by incorporating our data into traditional survey data. For endangered species, traditional survey data required >2,000 records to build accurate models (Boyce index ≥ 0.9), though only ca.300 records were required when the two data sources were blended. The unique data distributions may explain this improvement: Biome data covers urban-natural gradients uniformly, while traditional data is biased towards natural areas. Combining multiple data sources offers insights into species distributions across Japan, aiding protected area designation and ecosystem service assessment. Providing a platform to accumulate community-sourced distribution data and improving data processing protocol will contribute to not only conserving natural ecosystems but also detecting species distribution changes and testing ecological theories.