The power of community science to quantify ecological interactions in cities

Abstract

Studying animals in urban environments is especially challenging because much of the area is private property not easily accessible to professional scientists. In addition, collecting data on animals that are cryptic, secretive, or rare is also challenging due to the time and resources needed to amass an adequate dataset. Here, we show that community science can be a powerful tool to overcome these challenges. We used observations submitted to the community science platform iNaturalist to assess predation and parasitism across urbanization gradients in a secretive, ‘hard-to-study’ species, the Southern Alligator Lizard (Elgaria multicarinata). From photographs, we quantified predation risk by assessing tail injuries and quantified parasitism by counting tick loads on lizards. We found that tail injuries increased with age and with urbanization, suggesting that urban areas are risky habitats. Conversely, parasitism decreased with urbanization likely due to a loss of hosts and anti-tick medications used on human companion animals. This community science approach generated a large dataset on a secretive species rapidly and at an immense spatial scale that facilitated quantitative measures of urbanization (e.g. percent impervious surface cover) as opposed to qualitative measures (e.g. urban vs. rural). We therefore demonstrate that community science can help resolve ecological questions that otherwise would be difficult to address.

Monitoring Trends in Distribution and Seasonality of Medically Important Ticks in North America Using Online Crowdsourced Records from iNaturalist

“…The iNaturalist database currently contains over 92 million observations of over 344,300 species from across the globe. This valuable resource is being increasingly used in scientific research, and these studies demonstrate consistent results between community- and scientist-collected data [ 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 ]. A previous analysis found that iNaturalist data concerning important tick and mosquito vectors correlated well with known geographical distributions and seasonality of these species [ 59 ].…”

“…As a general wildlife observation platform, iNaturalist also includes a vast amount of data of other species that may be relevant to tick research, for example animals that are important tick hosts and/or reservoir hosts for tick-borne pathogens ( Figure 5 ). One study has utilized iNaturalist observations to record tick infestations on rare Southern Alligator Lizards ( Elgaria multicarinata ) [ 61 ]. This aspect of iNaturalist also means that users need no pre-existing tick awareness to report a tick observation, as an image can be uploaded without knowledge of its identity.…”

How Do Young Community and Citizen Science Volunteers Support Scientific Research on Biodiversity? The Case of iNaturalist

“…The species images (photos), combined with a wealth of metadata and the recorded data quality validation, have attracted biodiversity scientists to use iNaturalist in their research. For example, Michonneau and Paulay [30] used iNaturalist to study the diversity of echinoderms; Rossi [31] examined red mangrove observations to detect foliar disease symptoms such as lesions; Heberling and Isaac [32] used iNaturalist to facilitate plant specimen collection and curate field images alongside physical specimens; and Putman et al [33] used iNaturalist to quantify lizard ecological interactions in urban areas.…”

Cultivating Bioliteracy, Biodiscovery, Data Literacy, and Ecological Monitoring in Undergraduate Courses with iNaturalist

“…Bioliteracy can take many forms, from being aware of the ecosystem services biodiversity provides, to being able to identify local species by name and learning about their natural history (Janzen 2001). As students use iNaturalist, they can also contribute to biodiscovery (Gazdic and Groom 2019;Putman et al 2021) and ecological monitoring . We define biodiscovery as the discovery of new species, interactions, and behaviors not previously recorded in a place and time period.…”