Recognition and completeness: two key metrics for judging the utility of citizen science data

Mesaglio, Thomas; Callaghan, Corey T.; Samonte, Fabrice; Gorta, Simon B. Z.; Cornwell, William K.

doi:10.1002/fee.2604

Cited by 17 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…For groups that are not well represented on photo-sharing websites, community data may need to be supplemented with data from museum specimens to achieve the desired results; for example, Ferro and Flick (2015) found that using only records from BugGuide poorly predicted the distribution of a rove beetle, but when records from museums were included the predicted distribution improved. Alternatively, data users could focus on charismatic groups that have the highest rates of recognition (identification to species level) and representation (% of known species represented in a data set), such as Lepidoptera and Odonata (Mesaglio et al 2023a), which may help account for biases.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So both across and within websites, these orders are overrepresented compared to their diversity. Mesaglio et al (2023a) reported that Lepidoptera and Odonata were the best recognized and most completely represented terrestrial invertebrate taxa in Australia on iNaturalist. There is also a bias to photograph larger, more colorful species within a given taxon compared to those that are smaller or less colorful, as Braz Sousa et al ( 2022) demonstrated with mosquitoes.…”

Section: Publications and Records Per Taxonmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices

Skvarla,

Fisher

2023

Annals of the Entomological Society of America

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Over the past 2 decades, digital photography has grown increasingly accessible. This has ushered in a golden age of community science, where nonspecialists share natural history observations from across the globe via digital media. Importantly, these observations are accessible to researchers, who can readily share expertise directly with the community and connect observations and observers with research projects. This has fueled a rising number of publications combining specialist and nonspecialist observations, which occasionally make national and international headlines. Entomology has embraced this trend, but the scope and impact are not clear. A review of its effect on the field is therefore warranted. Herein, we review and analyze publications that incorporated information from photographs shared on photo-sharing websites. In total, 2,123 publications that incorporated information from 77 photo-sharing websites were examined. Seven websites accounted for 66% of the publication citations. 84.6% of publications focused on data from the Holarctic ecoregion (56.2% Palearctic and 28.4% Nearctic). Forty-six arthropod orders were represented, but the Big Five—Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, and Diptera—accounted for 75% of all publications. We divide the publications into 28 discovery and use categories, review how community photograph data has been used within each category, and provide examples of categories utilized in nonentomology natural history fields, which we hope will provide inspiration and spur future research. We also discuss benefits and considerations when using such data—including the accuracy of identifications, inherent biases, and digital data impermanence—and suggest best practices to follow.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Publications and Records Per Taxonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices

Skvarla,

Fisher

2023

Annals of the Entomological Society of America

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“…However, the rate of plant taxon determination to species level in this study is quite better than what is noted in some taxa of animal kingdom. Indeed [30] found out in Australia that only 60.9% of the taxa are determined to species level in the terrestrial invertebrates' observations on iNaturalist. With respect to plant species of Africa, my suggestion is to refer to the specimen images where possible to complement the determination of species.…”

Section: -Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Will Africa meet the challenge of biodiversity conservation in the digital age?

Ganglo

2023

Preprint

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Digital Accessible Knowledge (DAK) is of utmost importance for biodiversity conservation. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, www.gbif.org) is a mega data infrastructure with more than two billion and two hundred million occurrence records as of 17 January 2023. It is by far the largest initiative assembling and sharing DAK to support scientific research, conservation, and sustainable development. We decided to analyze plant data published at the GBIF site at the scale of Africa to highlight the contribution of the continent to the GBIF and thereby underline data gaps across taxonomic groups and geographic space. We therefore downloaded data on 17th January 2023 from the Plantae kingdom from Africa. They are available at https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.p2n6um. We achieved data treatment and analysis using R, several packages and related functions. Although Africa is home to rich biodiversity with many hotspots, the global data contribution of the continent to the GBIF (61,176,994 as of 17th January 2023) is still incredibly low (2.69%). Furthermore, there are huge disparities between African countries, with South Africa contributing alone for more than 50% of the data of the continent. The plant data of Africa (9,116,401 occurrence records) accounted for 14.90% of the data of the continent; this underlines huge gaps between taxonomic groups. We deplored important data loss during the process of data cleaning; indeed, the data fitness for purpose in completeness analysis were only 50.94% of the total data records initially downloaded. Efforts for quality check before data publication on GBIF site are still needed across African countries. The Magnoliopsida was the dominant plant class with the highest number of records (71.07%) and the highest number of species (68.36%), followed by Liliopsida, with 22.80% of the records and 19.06% of the species. In geographic space, plant data gaps are also quite large across the continent; data completeness is more achieved in West Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, and Madagascar. Accessibility by roads and large protected areas (> 10,000 Km²) are limiting factors for data completeness across the continent. The large multidimensional data gaps identified in this study should be in priority addressed in future data collections.

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“…For example, management and policy implications from further investigations of insect responses to fire would benefit from a focus on lower taxonomic levels (Saunders et al, 2021). To this end, further fire‐response research on readily identifiable insect species, from groups including dragonflies, damselflies, and butterflies which are well represented in iNaturalist observations (Mesaglio et al, 2023), would provide finer scale insights more applicable to environmental managers. By integrating the data available through standardized local, species‐, or population‐specific monitoring and broader scale citizen science data, we will have a greater information base from which to identify how and where to sample minimizing gaps and redundancies post‐disturbance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi‐taxon biodiversity responses to the 2019–2020 Australian megafires

Gorta,

Callaghan,

Samonte

et al. 2023

Global Change Biology

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Conditions conducive to fires are becoming increasingly common and widespread under climate change. Recent fire events across the globe have occurred over unprecedented scales, affecting a diverse array of species and habitats. Understanding biodiversity responses to such fires is critical for conservation. Quantifying post‐fire recovery is problematic across taxa, from insects to plants to vertebrates, especially at large geographic scales. Novel datasets can address this challenge. We use presence‐only citizen science data from iNaturalist, collected before and after the 2019–2020 megafires in burnt and unburnt regions of eastern Australia, to quantify the effect of post‐fire diversity responses, up to 18 months post‐fire. The geographic, temporal, and taxonomic sampling of this dataset was large, but sampling effort and species discoverability were unevenly spread. We used rarefaction and prediction (iNEXT) with which we controlled sampling completeness among treatments, to estimate diversity indices (Hill numbers: q = 0–2) among nine broad taxon groupings and seven habitats, including 3885 species. We estimated an increase in species diversity up to 18 months after the 2019–2020 Australian megafires in regions which were burnt, compared to before the fires in burnt and unburnt regions. Diversity estimates in dry sclerophyll forest matched and likely drove this overall increase post‐fire, while no taxon groupings showed clear increases inconsistent with both control treatments post‐fire. Compared to unburnt regions, overall diversity across all taxon groupings and habitats greatly decreased in areas exposed to extreme fire severity. Post‐fire life histories are complex and species detectability is an important consideration in all post‐fire sampling. We demonstrate how fire characteristics, distinct taxa, and habitat influence biodiversity, as seen in local‐scale datasets. Further integration of large‐scale datasets with small‐scale studies will lead to a more robust understanding of fire recovery.

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Recognition and completeness: two key metrics for judging the utility of citizen science data

Cited by 17 publications

References 28 publications

Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices

Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices

Will Africa meet the challenge of biodiversity conservation in the digital age?

Multi‐taxon biodiversity responses to the 2019–2020 Australian megafires

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