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a iSpot participants who made at least one observation, ranked on the horizontal axis by the number of observations each made (shown on the vertical axis). b iSpot participants who made at least one determination ranked on the horizontal axis by the number of identifications each made. n = 201,711 observations on ispotnature.org for both.
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Accurate species identification is fundamental to biodiversity science, but the natural history skills re-quired 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 learnin...
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Presentamos un inventario de anuros en la zona de amortiguamiento del Parque Internacional La Amistad, realizado por personas locales. Discutimos los resultados en torno al marco de Ciencia Ciudadana y su aplicación para estudios de anfibios, así como el nivel de incertidumbre de la identificación de especies por fotografías. Registramos 15 especie...
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... Through digital technologies, increasingly diverse CS projects are available for citizens to participate in (Preece, 2016) on a growing number of online platforms (e.g., www. zooniverse.org, Cox et al., 2015;www.ispotnature.org;Silvertown et al., 2015;www. inaturalist.org; Aristeidou et al., 2021). These platforms feature projects from a diverse spectrum of disciplines, from environmental science through astrophysics and chemistry to literature and the arts. On the one hand, CS is an immense support for scientists in gathering extensive data sets and carrying out large scale research ...
In this case study, we report on the recruitment of participants for a citizen science (CS) project on urban wildlife monitoring (about 860 participants), and the consequences of recruitment strategies for achieving the project goals. We describe the approach that we used to identify our target audience and to design the core message for the recruitment campaign. We searched for participants who were interested in wildlife and in the scientific research process. We based the recruitment campaign on the appeal of discovering wildlife in people’s immediate surroundings. Recruitment was successful in terms of the number of applications we received. Participants’ interests reflected their focus on wildlife, and we discuss how this was reflected in their engagement. We use this case study to highlight the importance of deliberately designing recruitment strategies for CS projects. Such strategies will have implications for participants’ motivation and ultimately may influence their contributions to the project.
... Another technology that is very similar to iNaturalist is iSpot [29,30]. iSpot requires underwater photos. ...
This dissertation focuses on the collection of biodiversity data using recreational SCUBA divers and visual surveys, exploring the role of interactive means used in citizen science for biodiversity monitoring performed in-situ. This work provides the tool for data gathering in the form of a tablet-based application inside of the physical structure, serving as a touchpoint interface, allowing recreational SCUBA divers to report the spotted marine species in the aftermath of diving activity. In an effort to facilitate long-term monitoring, it further analyses the usability of such system and the overall level of engagement by the diving community
... contributed tasks, time invested) are also important to consider in relation to the demographics of participants. Citizen science projects are often characterized by a smaller proportion of highly motivated long-term volunteers contributing extensively with knowledge and time (Silvertown et al. 2015;Seymour and Haklay 2017). Projects that rely on exclusive communities risk losing highly specialized, skilled and committed participants, if implemented project tools (e.g. ...
Biological recording is a prominent and widely practised form of citizen science, but few studies explore long-term demographic trends in participation and knowledge production. We studied long-term demographic trends of age and gender of participants reporting to a large online citizen science multi-taxon biodiversity platform (www.artportalen.se). Adoption by user communities and continually developing Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) greatly increased the number of participants reporting data, but profound long-term imbalances in gender contribution across species groups persisted over time. Reporters identifying as male dominated in numbers, spent more days in the field reporting and reported more species on each field day. Moreover, an age imbalance towards older participants amplified over time. As the first long-term study of citizen participation by age and gender, our results show that it is important for citizen science project developers to account for cultural and social developments that might exclude participants, and to engage with under-represented and younger participants. This could facilitate the breadth of engagement and learning across a larger societal landscape, ensure project longevity and biodiversity data representation (e.g. mitigate gender bias influence on the number of reports of different species groups).
... Unlike structured surveys, where sampling time and intensity are often strictly controlled, community photograph data, and community science data more generally, are unstructured and prone to bias. This bias can manifest in multiple ways, such as most observations being made on weekends when users have more free time, more observations being made during warmer months, certain environments having more representation in data, and more records coming from developed areas where more people live, certain taxa being over-or under-represented, and observers not finding or reporting all species at a site (van Strien et al. 2013b, Silvertown et al. 2015, Troudet et al. 2017, Callaghan et al. 2021, Di Cecco et al. 2021, Mesaglio and Callaghan 2021, Mesaglio et al. 2023b). These biases are not likely to be an issue when using single or a few records for, for example, distribution. ...
... For example, QuestaGame weights identifications based on a user's expertise, which is tied to the number of previous identifications they have made in a category but can be modified based on other factors such as professional experience, and incentivizes experts to provide identifications by generating "BioCoins," which can be converted into monetary donations to various nature organizations. iSpot has a 9-dimension reputational system that is influenced by the number of "correct" identifications a user makes and is incentivized and designated by different "badges" and badge levels that are displayed on a user's profile (Silvertown et al. 2015). iNaturalist has an AI that offers an initial list of possible identifications and then considers records to be "Research Grade" if a photograph has been identified below family level by at least 2 users and 2/3 of users agree upon an identification, with all users having votes of equal weight. ...
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.
... Citizen science, which scientists have begun to call "community science," has great potential for monitoring biodiversity and species distributions Silvertown et al., 2015;Sullivan et al., 2009). The development of novel tools and technology has empowered community science and increased its potential. ...
... Participants can understand the names of organisms by looking at others' photographs or by receiving comments for their photographs. However, there are several disadvantages with community science monitoring using photographs: the difficulty of species identification using photographs (Falk et al., 2019;Gardiner et al., 2012;Silvertown et al., 2015;Suzuki-Ohno et al., 2022) and the bias of the subject species in photographs due to human preferences (Marcenò et al., 2021). ...
Abstract Environmental DNA is a powerful tool for community science‐based biodiversity surveys. However, the effectiveness of environmental DNA for environmental education and the time and physical costs perceived by volunteers for collecting environmental DNA remain unclear. Here, we evaluated a community science program for monitoring marine fish biodiversity using environmental DNA metabarcoding. This program aimed to investigate marine fish biodiversity in coastal areas along the Japanese archipelago. The participants were allowed to decide on the date and site to collect environmental DNA. They received a paper manual, a data sheet, and a sampling kit via a parcel delivery service. Before collecting environmental DNA, they watched a video manual for collecting environmental DNA and attended a webinar about the process and precautions for collecting environmental DNA provided by the scientists. At the sampling sites, they obtained environmental DNA samples from seawater themselves and sent the samples to the scientists via a refrigerated parcel delivery service. After collecting environmental DNA, they received fish name data from their samples and attended a webinar about survey results provided by the scientists. A cumulative total of 168 volunteers (84 pairs) participated in the program and detected 572 taxonomic groups of fish environmental DNA in the summer of 2020 and 2021. According to a questionnaire survey, more than 75% of the respondents answered that the project improved their understanding of biodiversity, marine environments, and environmental DNA. Approximately 95% of the respondents thought that environmental DNA collection work was meaningful to them. Some respondents commented on the difficulty of interpreting their fish name data, or the time and effort of selecting a sampling site. Therefore, improving the methods to communicate more information about fish name data and select sampling sites will further develop community science monitoring using environmental DNA.
... Although these datasets can be powerful, there is concern that these data are of lower quality than natural history collections (Gardiner et al., 2012). Correctly determining a species identification can be challenging for many nonexperts, even if they have some familiarity with the subject species (Silvertown et al., 2015); however, expert users on the platform can help by corroborating or correcting identifications. Geographic accuracy of observation points may be lower as well due to issues relating to privacy and errors, such as incorrectly uploading information from mobile devices (Suzuki-Ohno et al., 2017). ...
Abstract Understanding the ranges of rare and endangered species is central to conserving biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Species distribution models (SDMs) have become a common and powerful tool for analyzing species–environment relationships across geographic space. Although evaluating the distribution of rare species is integral to their conservation, this can be difficult when limited distribution data are available. Community science platforms, such as iNaturalist, have emerged as alternative sources for species occurrence data. Although these observations are often thought to be of lower quality than those of natural history collections, they may have potential for improving SDMs for species with few occurrence records from collections. Here, we investigate the utility of iNaturalist data for developing SDMs for a rare high‐elevation plant, Telesonix jamesii. Because methods for modeling rare species are limited in the literature, five different modeling techniques were considered, including profile methods, statistical models, and machine learning algorithms. The inclusion of iNaturalist data doubled the number of usable records for T. jamesii. We found that a random forest (RF) model using ensemble training data performed the highest of any model (area under curve = 0.98). We then compared the performance of RF models that use only natural history training data and those that use a combination of natural history (herbarium specimens) and iNaturalist training data. All models heavily relied on climate data (mean temperature of driest quarter, and precipitation of the warmest quarter), indicating that this species is under threat as climate continues to change. Validation datasets affected model fits as well. Models using only herbarium data performed slightly poorer when evaluated with cross‐validation than when validated externally with iNaturalist data. This study can serve as a model for future SDM studies of species with similar data limitations.
... Scientific inquiry is inherent to CS projects, because participants get involved with scientific activities (Peterman et al., 2017;see Stylinski et al., 2020, for an overview), such as collecting and analyzing data (e.g., iSpot; Silvertown et al., 2015). CS projects allow citizens to involve themselves in scientific activities to varying degrees (e.g., Bonney et al., 2009;Shirk et al., 2012). ...
In citizen science (CS) projects, citizens who are not professional scientists participate in scientific research. Besides serving research purposes, CS projects provide participants opportunities for inquiry‐based learning to promote their topic‐specific knowledge and scientific reasoning skills. Previous research suggests that participants need scientific reasoning skills to engage in scientific activities and to learn from inquiry in CS projects. Participants' scientific reasoning skills, therefore, might enhance the resulting topic‐specific knowledge at the end of a CS project. On the other hand, scientific reasoning skills themselves are a learning outcome of CS projects. Hence, they might play a double role in CS projects: as a learning outcome and as a prerequisite for acquiring knowledge. In the informal education context of CS, it has not yet been investigated whether scientific reasoning skills predict topic‐specific knowledge or vice versa. To address this question, the research presented here used a cross‐lagged panel design in two longitudinal field studies of a CS project on urban wildlife ecology (N = 144 participants). The results indicated that participants' scientific reasoning skills positively influenced their topic‐specific knowledge at the end of the project, but not vice versa. Extending previous research on individual learning outcomes of CS projects, the results showed that inquiry‐based learning in CS projects depends on certain prerequisites, such as participants' proficiency in scientific reasoning. We discuss the implications for future research on inquiry‐based learning in CS projects and for further training of CS participants in acquiring scientific reasoning skills.
... 1.2.4 Citizen science practice. Citizen science projects such as iNaturalist [64] and iSpot [80] rely on creating communities of nature enthusiasts uploading photographs of plant and animal species as well as identifying specimens on photos shared by other members of the community. More specifically, they i) require multiple annotations for producing reliable data, ii) highlight expertise of the members using user ratings (a method to highlight individual uniqueness) and iii) use free text commenting to capture opinions as well as scientific information. ...
... More specifically, they i) require multiple annotations for producing reliable data, ii) highlight expertise of the members using user ratings (a method to highlight individual uniqueness) and iii) use free text commenting to capture opinions as well as scientific information. Annotations are usually provided by members of the community using their expertise while additional members can agree or even improve the existing level of annotations [80]. However, the feedback effect of these techniques (individually or in combination) on data quality, engagement and citizen science learning is largely unknown. ...
... Ratings of user expertise are widely utilised in both online and citizen science communities, and the literature has suggested they are effective for engagement and for improving the performance of a group [9,46,49,80,88]. We use "User ratings" as the second design intervention, whereby we highlight the expertise and experience of individual members of the group and study its effect for building consensus in a group. ...
A number of initiatives invite members of the public to perform online classification tasks such as identifying objects in images. These tasks are crucial to numerous large-scale Citizen Science projects in different disciplines, with volunteers using their knowledge and online support tools to, for example, identify species of wildlife or classify galaxies by their shapes. However, for complex classification tasks, such as this case study on identifying species of bumblebee, reaching an agreement between volunteers-or even between experts-may require consensus-building processes. Collaboration and teamwork approaches to problem solving and decision-making have been widely documented to improve both task performance and user learning in the real world. Most of these processes and projects are mediated online through feedback delivered in an asynchronous manner, and this article thus addresses a central research question: How do participants involved in species identification tasks respond to different forms of feedback provided in online collaboration, designed to support peer-learning and improve task performance? We tested four different approaches to feedback within a collaboration task, where participants reviewed their previously annotated data based on information curated from their peers on a long running online citizen science initiative. The selected interfaces have a strong foundation in social science and psychology literature and can be applied to citizen science practices as well as other online communities. Results showed that while all four approaches increased accuracy, there were differences based on the types of consensus that existed before collaboration. Such differences highlight the usefulness of different forms of feedback during collaboration for increasing data accuracy of identification and furthering users' expertise on identification tasks. We found that anonymised and goal-directed free text comments posted on social learning interfaces were most effective in improving data accuracy as well as creating opportunities for peer-learning, particularly where the species identification task was more difficult. This study has significant implications for extending the practice of citizen science across formal and informal learning environments and reaching out to a variety of users.
... Often, different stakeholders and communities are involved in a citizen science project apart from the volunteers or citizen scientists. For example, volunteers can participate at different levels in a citizen science project, but they need short-term rewards, triggers, and other short-term engagement actions to keep them motivated and continue participating [39,40]. In contrast, the scientific outputs and the creation of evidence-based policies resulting from the work of volunteers in a project usually take months to years and act as a long-term reward for volunteers. ...
Effective citizen engagement is generally accepted as one of the most important steps for the success of citizen science programs. However, there is a lack of a common theoretical framework for recruitment and most projects rely on intuition or trial-and-error to develop their engagement strategies. Effective citizen science engagement needs theoretical participation frameworks and the concurrent action of different engagement roles to implement the framework. Besides, we must consider the various short-term and long-term engagement needs of the communities involved in the project. Furthermore, citizen science platforms are evolving towards infrastructures with technical but also social components to ensure long-term engagement. In this study, we have developed and tested an engagement framework for environmental citizen science projects using a novel approach that combines strategies and theoretical models that have proven efficient in other disciplines, such as human behaviour change and persuasion. Our framework is based on four interconnected pillars that feed each other: theoretical engagement models for behavioural change; social design for citizen science platforms, strategies for maintaining volunteer motivation; and strategies to increment the volunteers’ ability. The combination of these four pillars results in a framework that integrates both short-term and long-term interaction mechanisms. This multi-temporal approach ensures keeping volunteers motivated and engaged for long periods, a requirement for many citizen science-monitoring programs. In addition, the theoretical framework points out the benefits of considering citizen science projects as a collaboration between multiple stakeholders to ensure long-term engagement. These stakeholders include the volunteers, but also new roles such as enabling communities that act as a bridge between volunteers and academia. Specifically, we have successfully tested this framework in a marine citizen science case study that monitors urban beaches. Furthermore, together with the proposed framework, we provide specific guidelines to help managers to design tailored strategies for their citizen science projects.
... The ease, accessibility and popularity of this activity has been significantly improved during the last decade by advances in GPS and mobile phone technology including plant identification apps (August et al., 2015;Pocock et al., 2015;Silvertown et al., 2015;Thomas & Fellowes, 2017). The expansion of citizen science, coupled with the increasing power of data analysis tools, has increased the volume of biological records being collected and the ability to investigate them (Roy et al., 2014Sutherland et al., 2015). ...
... These include both the B. repens and I. verticillatum described above, as well as an exceptionally high Betula pubescens growing near the summit of Stob Coire Sgriodain (Fig.4), which is 129 m above the previous altitudinal record from Ben Lawers. However, Table 1 (August et al., 2015;Pocock et al., 2015;Silvertown et al., 2015), there are still remote areas in Britain which are rich in undiscovered rare flora. It is therefore useful to include such places in monitoring programmes, in addition to thorough recording of already well-documented and renowned sites of conservation interest (JNCC, 2010;Sutton, 2020b). ...
Biological recording in Britain has increased in accessibility and popularity due to recent technological advances. However, remote locations may still be under-recorded, particularly for aquatic plants and taxonomically challenging groups. We describe a set of notable botanical discoveries made in 2021 at Corrour in the Scottish Highlands (v.c.97 Westerness), including Baldellia repens, Illecebrum verticillatum (new to Scotland) and six British altitudinal records. At the time of writing, there are now four Nationally Rare vascular plant taxa recorded on the estate and 29 Nationally Scarce taxa. These findings demonstrate the value of collaboration between land managers, ecologists, BSBI staff and the local community. Both B. repens and I. verticillatum are well established at Corrour in considerable abundance and with clear evidence of regeneration. B. repens also occurs in the Tay catchment and may have arrived at Corrour via vegetative dispersal by waterfowl. The origin of I. verticillatum is more ambiguous but suggested mechanisms of dispersal include forestry, the railway or hydroelectricity workings. Despite a likely element of accidental human-mediated spread, I. verticillatum should be considered an intriguing addition to the flora of Westerness. Climate change could facilitate further establishment of this taxa in northern parts of Britain, and it is likely that other new records of both B. repens and I. verticillatum await.
