Citizen Science and the Pandemic: A Case Study of the Christmas Bird Count

Abstract

Citizen science has contributed much to our knowledge of North American birds, with programs like Christmas Bird Count (CBC) providing valuable data on population dynamics, winter distribution, irruption patterns, range expansions, invasion dynamics, community ecology, and the effects of climate change. However, the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 had the potential to restrict participation and detrimentally impact the scientific value of 2020 count results. CBC data from throughout North America for 2020 were compared to trends from the previous ten years. Participation was reduced in several ways, including number of counts, number of participants, and spatial distribution of counts. However, based on a subset of states and provinces, number of species recorded was not impacted. Care should be taken when using 2020 CBC data for studies requiring fine-scale geographic resolution.

200 Years of Caprimulgid Records in Southern Brazil: A Comparison between the Literature and Citizen Science Data

“…This led to a lower sampling effort, resulting in fewer priority species being recorded [49]. However, contrary to patterns observed in South [49] and North America [47], citizen scientists in Brazil increased their observations. This trend was also observed on another ornithological platform [21].…”

“…Interestingly, the reduced number of records in the literature did not necessarily mean a lower number of species recorded [47]. In the case of Paraná, despite the increased number of records, there was only one addition (see below) to species richness.…”

Influence of an extreme event—the COVID-19 pandemic—On establishment of and data collection by a citizen science project

“…Outdoor citizen science programs had greater success with recruitment and engagement than other citizen science programs during the pandemic [22], but even these varied with respect to participation. For instance, while some projects experienced a decline in overall participation [1,19,23], other biological monitoring citizen science projects saw either no overall impact or an increase in data collection from the volunteers they retained [24][25][26]. In both cases, observations typically came from a small subset of participants who either sustained participation or became more active during the pandemic, often in pursuit of a hobby or sense of normalcy [1,19,[23][24][25].…”

“…For instance, while some projects experienced a decline in overall participation [1,19,23], other biological monitoring citizen science projects saw either no overall impact or an increase in data collection from the volunteers they retained [24][25][26]. In both cases, observations typically came from a small subset of participants who either sustained participation or became more active during the pandemic, often in pursuit of a hobby or sense of normalcy [1,19,[23][24][25]. Thus, in some instances, the pandemic became an opportunity for citizen science projects to harness the enthusiasm of some participants under quarantine toward field-based data collection; whereas in other cases, data collection declined [1,19,21].…”

“…However, others (i.e. The BioBlitz event in Tokyo, Japan [19], the Southern African Bird Atlas Project [1], and the Christmas Bird count in USA/Canada [23]) had a decline in participation. It is likely that varying restrictions during the pandemic influenced the levels of participation in these projects [1,23,26].…”