Rapidly mapping fire effects on biodiversity at a large-scale using citizen science

COVERater-A Free Application for Training Researchers to Accurately Estimate Species Cover in Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecosystems

Visual estimates of cover are widely used among ecologists, from describing vegetation communities to tracking and monitoring species' abundance. However, despite the known bias associated with visual estimates, no standardised training is available to improve these measurements. We developed a free online training tool, the COVERater, that effectively teaches users to visually estimate the percent cover of species in a variety of ecosystems (including alpine heath, arid lands, coral reefs, temperate reefs and wetlands). Prior to training, users with prior professional experience estimated species cover to an average inaccuracy of 5.2%, while users with no experience estimated cover to an average inaccuracy of 7.6%. COVERater training took an average of 31 min and 68 images, and reduced the estimate inaccuracy of users with no prior experience to 5.2%. There was no significant loss of estimate accuracy over 100 days following training. The COVERater can be used anywhere in the world, by data collectors of all experience levels, for projects spanning all spatial scales. By providing researchers with standardised training, our application can reduce variation in cover estimates that arise from human biases, allowing for comparable estimates across global collaborative projects and data syntheses. We encourage all relevant scientists to include COVERater training in their protocols to quantify cover with greater accuracy, improve the veracity of their results and make better inferences about our biosphere.

Assessing citizen science data quality for bird monitoring in the Iberian Peninsula

Citizen science data on biodiversity has experienced significant growth, largely driven by advancements in technology that facilitate data sharing. In recent years, mobile applications have provided a substantial boost to both the collection and sharing of this data. While this accessible information is undoubtedly valuable, we must consider the numerous biases present in this data when used for high-quality research. In this study, we analyse citizen science data for the birds of the Iberian Peninsula, comprising over 23 million unique records after filtering for duplicates (i.e., instances where the same observation was uploaded more than once). Using a 10 × 10 km square grid, we present information on well-surveyed cells (completeness) as well as temporal, taxonomic, geographical, and land use coverages. We found that the completeness of information is generally high, with better coverage around densely populated areas such as major cities and coastal regions, as well as popular birding destinations, which are frequently visited. The Mediterranean ecoregion and wetlands exhibit the highest levels of surveying. Furthermore, we observed an increase in temporal coverage since the 1980s and broad taxonomic coverage across all bird orders in the Iberian region. Our results underscore the utility of citizen science for many locations, as expressed in 10 × 10 km cells. However, they also highlight the inadequate data completeness across part of the territory, particularly in forested or sparsely inhabited areas. These findings not only identify cells suitable for bird diversity or conservation studies but also indicate areas where citizen-driven bird recording efforts should be encouraged.

Incorporating citizen science into IUCN Red List assessments

Many citizen scientists are highly motivated to help address the current extinction crisis. Their work is making valuable contributions to protecting species by raising awareness, identifying species occurrences, assessing population trends, and informing direct management actions, such as captive breeding. However, clear guidance is lacking about how to use existing citizen science data sets and how to design effective citizen science programs that directly inform extinction risk assessments and resulting conservation actions based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List criteria. This may be because of a mismatch between what citizen science can deliver to address extinction risk and the reality of what is needed to inform threatened species listing based on IUCN criteria. To overcome this problem, we examined each IUCN Red List criterion (A-E) relative to the five major types of citizen science outputs relevant to IUCN assessments (occurrence data, presence-absence observations, structured surveys, physical samples, and narratives) to recommend which outputs are most suited to use when applying the IUCN extinction risk assessment process. We explored real-world examples of citizen science projects on amphibians and fungi that have delivered valuable data and knowledge for IUCN assessments. We found that although occurrence data are routinely used in the assessment process, simply adding more observations of occurrence from citizen science information may not be as valuable as inclusion of more nuanced data types, such as presence-absence data or information on threats from structured surveys. We then explored the characteristics of citizen science projects that have already delivered valuable data to support assessments. These projects were led by recognized experts who champion and validate citizen science data, thereby giving greater confidence in its accuracy. We urge increased recognition of the value of citizen science data within the assessment process.

A local community on a global collective intelligence platform: A case study of individual preferences and collective bias in ecological citizen science

The collective intelligence of crowds could potentially be harnessed to address global challenges, such as biodiversity loss and species' extinction. For wisdom to emerge from the crowd, certain conditions are required. Importantly, the crowd should be diverse and people's contributions should be independent of one another. Here we investigate a global citizen-science platform-iNaturalist-on which citizens report on wildlife observations, collectively producing maps of species' spatiotemporal distribution. The organization of global platforms such as iNaturalist around local projects compromises the assumption of diversity and independence, and thus raises concerns regarding the quality of such collectively-generated data. We spent four years closely immersing ourselves in a local community of citizen scientists who reported their wildlife sightings on iNaturalist. Our ethnographic study involved the use of questionnaires, interviews, and analysis of archival materials. Our analysis revealed observers' nuanced considerations as they chose where, when, and what type of species to monitor, and which observations to report. Following a thematic analysis of the data, we organized observers' preferences and constraints into four main categories: recordability, community value, personal preferences, and convenience. We show that while some individual partialities can "cancel each other out", others are commonly shared among members of the community, potentially biasing the aggregate database of observations. Our discussion draws attention to the way in which widely-shared individual preferences might manifest as spatial, temporal, and crucially, taxonomic biases in the collectively-created database. We offer avenues for continued research that will help better understand-and tackle-individual preferences, with the goal of attenuating collective bias in data, and facilitating the generation of reliable state-of-nature reports. Finally, we offer insights into the broader literature on biases in collective intelligence systems.

Emerging technologies in citizen science and potential for insect monitoring

Emerging technologies are increasingly employed in environmental citizen science projects. This integration offers benefits and opportunities for scientists and participants alike. Citizen science can support large-scale, long-term monitoring of species occurrences, behaviour and interactions. At the same time, technologies can foster participant engagement, regardless of pre-existing taxonomic expertise or experience, and permit new types of data to be collected. Yet, technologies may also create challenges by potentially increasing financial costs, necessitating technological expertise or demanding training of participants. Technology could also reduce people's direct involvement and engagement with nature. In this perspective, we discuss how current technologies have spurred an increase in citizen science projects and how the implementation of emerging technologies in citizen science may enhance scientific impact and public engagement. We show how technology can act as (i) a facilitator of current citizen science and monitoring efforts, (ii) an enabler of new research opportunities, and (iii) a transformer of science, policy and public participation, but could also become (iv) an inhibitor of participation, equity and scientific rigour. Technology is developing fast and promises to provide many exciting opportunities for citizen science and insect monitoring, but while we seize these opportunities, we must remain vigilant against potential risks. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards a toolkit for global insect biodiversity monitoring'.

Extracting secondary data from citizen science images reveals host flower preferences of the Mexican grass-carrying wasp Isodontia mexicana in its native and introduced ranges

We investigated the plant-pollinator interactions of the Mexican grass-carrying wasp Isodontia mexicana-native to North America and introduced in Europe in the 1960s-through the use of secondary data from citizen science observations. We applied a novel data exchange workflow from two global citizen science platforms, iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. Images from iNaturalist of the wasp were used to query the Pl@ntNet application to identify possible plant species present in the pictures. Simultaneously, botanists manually identified the plants at family, genus and species levels and additionally documented flower color and biotic interactions. The goals were to calibrate Pl@ntNet's accuracy in relation to this workflow, update the list of plant species that I. mexicana visits as well as its flower color preferences in its native and introduced ranges. In addition, we investigated the types and corresponding frequencies of other biotic interactions incidentally captured on the citizen scientists' images. Although the list of known host plants could be expanded, identifying the flora from images that predominantly show an insect proved difficult for both experts and the Pl@ntNet app. The workflow performs with a 75% probability of correct identification of the plant at the species level from a score of 0.8, and with over 90% chance of correct family and genus identification from a score of 0.5. Although the number of images above these scores may be limited due to the flower parts present on the pictures, our approach can help to get an overview into species interactions and generate more specific research questions. It could be used as a triaging method to select images for further investigation. Additionally, the manual analysis of the images has shown that the information they contain offers great potential for learning more about the ecology of an introduced species in its new range.

Citizen science initiatives document biodiversity baselines at an urban lake

Changes to biodiversity from urbanization are occurring worldwide, and baseline data is vital to document the magnitude and direction of these alterations. We set out to document the biodiversity of an urban lake in Eastern Iowa that was devoid of baseline data prior to a renovation project that will convert the site into a major area for human recreation. Throughout the course of one year, we studied the biodiversity at Cedar Lake utilizing the citizen-science application iNaturalist coupled with semi-structured BioBlitz events, which we compared to previous opportunistic observations at the site. From a semi-structured approach to document biodiversity with citizen science, our analyses revealed more diverse community metrics over a shorter period compared to more than a decade of prior observations.

Multi-taxon biodiversity responses to the 2019-2020 Australian megafires

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.

Not all who wander are lost: Trail bias in community science

The exponential growth and interest in community science programs is producing staggering amounts of biodiversity data across broad temporal and spatial scales. Large community science datasets such as iNaturalist and eBird are allowing ecologists and conservation biologists to answer novel questions that were not possible before. However, the opportunistic nature of many of these enormous datasets leads to biases. Spatial bias is a common problem, where observations are biased towards points of access like roads and trails. iNaturalist-a popular biodiversity community science platform-exhibits strong spatial biases, but it is unclear how these biases affect the quality of biodiversity data collected. Thus, we tested whether fine-scale spatial bias due to sampling from trails affects taxonomic richness estimates. We compared timed transects with experienced iNaturalist observers on and off trails in British Columbia, Canada. Using generalized linear mixed models, we found higher overall taxonomic richness on trails than off trails. In addition, we found more exotic as well as native taxa on trails than off trails. There was no difference between on and off trail observations for species that are rarely observed. Thus, fine-scale spatial bias from trails does not reduce the quality of biodiversity measurements, a promising result for those interested in using iNaturalist data for research and conservation management.

Broadening the focus of forest conservation beyond carbon

Two concurrent trends are contributing towards a much broader view of forest conservation. First, the appreciation of the role of forests as a nature-based climate solution has grown rapidly, particularly among governments and the private sector. Second, the spatiotemporal resolution of forest mapping and the ease of tracking forest changes have dramatically improved. As a result, who does and who pays for forest conservation is changing: sectors and people previously considered separate from forest conservation now play an important role and need to be held accountable and motivated or forced to conserve forests. This change requires, and has stimulated, a broader range of forest conservation solutions. The need to assess the outcomes of conservation interventions has motivated the development and application of sophisticated econometric analyses, enabled by high resolution satellite data. At the same time, the focus on climate, together with the nature of available data and evaluation methods, has worked against a more comprehensive view of forest conservation. Instead, it has encouraged a focus on trees as carbon stores, often leaving out other important goals of forest conservation, such as biodiversity and human wellbeing. Even though both are intrinsically connected to climate outcomes, these areas have not kept pace with the scale and diversification of forest conservation. Finding synergies between these 'co-benefits', which play out on a local scale, with the carbon objective, related to the global amount of forests, is a major challenge and area for future advances in forest conservation.

Citizen Science Mosquito Surveillance by Ad Hoc Observation Using the iNaturalist Platform

Citizen science mosquito surveillance has been growing in recent years due to both increasing concern about mosquito-borne disease and the increasing popularity of citizen science projects globally. Health authorities are recognising the potential importance of citizen science to expanding or enhancing traditional surveillance programs. Different programs have shown success in engaging communities to monitor species of medical importance through low-cost methods. The Mozzie Monitors project was established on iNaturalist-an open citizen science platform that allows participants to upload photos (i.e., observers) and assist identification (i.e., identifiers). This article describes the likelihood of citizen scientists submitting photos of mosquitoes, assesses user submission behaviour, and evaluates public health utility from these citizen science-derived data. From October 2018 to July 2021, the Mozzie Monitors project on iNaturalist received 2118 observations of 57 different species of mosquitoes across Australia. The number of observers in the system increased over time with more than 500 observers and 180 identifiers being active in the project since its establishment. Data showed species bias with large-bodied and colourful mosquitoes being over-represented. Analyses also indicate regional differentiation of mosquito fauna per state, seasonality of activity, and ecological information about mosquitoes. The iNaturalist citizen science platform also allows connectedness, facilitated communication and collaboration between overall users and expert entomologists, of value to medical entomology and mosquito management.

Unravelling the Stability of Nightingale Song Over Time and Space Using Open, Citizen Science and Shared Data

Open science approaches enable and facilitate the investigation of many scientific questions in bioacoustics, such as studies on the temporal and spatial evolution of song, as in vocal dialects. In contrast to previous dialect studies, which mostly focused on songbird species with a small repertoire, here we studied the common nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos), a bird species with a complex and large repertoire. To study dialects on the population level in this species, we used recordings from four datasets: an open museum archive, a citizen science platform, a citizen science project, and shared recordings from academic researchers. We conducted to the date largest temporal and geographic dialect study of birdsong including recordings from 1930 to 2019 and from 13 European countries, with a geographical coverage of 2,652 km of linear distance. To examine temporal stability and spatial dialects, a catalog of 1,868 song types of common nightingales was created. Instead of dialects, we found a high degree of stability over time and space in both, the sub-categories of song and in the occurrence of song types. For example, the second most common song type in our datasets occurred over nine decades and across Europe. In our case study, open and citizen science data proved to be equivalent, and in some cases even better, than data shared by an academic research group. Based on our results, we conclude that the combination of diverse and open datasets was particularly useful to study the evolution of song in a bird species with a large repertoire.

Semantic Conceptual Framework for Environmental Monitoring and Surveillance—A Case Study on Forest Fire Video Monitoring and Surveillance

This paper presents a semantic conceptual framework and definition of environmental monitoring and surveillance and demonstrates an ontology implementation of the framework. This framework is defined in a mathematical formulation and is built upon and focused on the notation of observation systems. This formulation is utilized in the analysis of the observation system. Three taxonomies are presented, namely, the taxonomy of (1) the sampling method, (2) the value format and (3) the functionality. The definition of concepts and their relationships in the conceptual framework clarifies the task of querying for information related to the state of the environment or conditions related to specific events. This framework aims to make the observation system more queryable and therefore more interactive for users or other systems. Using the proposed semantic conceptual framework, we derive definitions of the distinguished tasks of monitoring and surveillance. Monitoring is focused on the continuous assessment of an environment state and surveillance is focused on the collection of all data relevant for specific events. The proposed mathematical formulation is implemented in the format of the computer readable ontology. The presented ontology provides a general framework for the semantic retrieval of relevant environmental information. For the implementation of the proposed framework, we present a description of the Intelligent Forest Fire Video Monitoring and Surveillance system in Croatia. We present the implementation of the tasks of monitoring and surveillance in the application domain of forest fire management.

Ecological consequences of Australian "Black Summer" (2019-20) fires: A synthesis of Australian Commonwealth Government report findings

During the summer of 2019-2020, more than 15 000 wildfires burned up to 19 million hectares of forest and woodland regions across Australia. These fires culminated in the worst Australian fire season on record, producing what has come to be known as the Australian "Black Summer." The fires have been described as an "ecological disaster," but the scale of the impacts is so extensive that the full ecological consequence may take years to assess. In the immediate aftermath of the Black Summer fires, two major national investigations were established by the Australian Commonwealth Government. By reviewing reports produced by these two investigations, high-level insights into the scale of the ecological consequences of the Black Summer fires have been obtained and are summarized here. Through these insights, the urgency for action to reduce the occurrence, and improve the management, of future comparable fire events is made clear. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2021;17:1136-1140. © 2021 SETAC.

A Framework of Observer-Based Biases in Citizen Science Biodiversity Monitoring: Semi-Structuring Unstructured Biodiversity Monitoring Protocols

Citizen science, whereby ordinary citizens participate in scientific endeavors, is widely used for biodiversity monitoring, most commonly by relying on unstructured monitoring approaches. Notwithstanding the potential of unstructured citizen science to engage the public and collect large amounts of biodiversity data, observers’ considerations regarding what, where and when to monitor result in biases in the aggregate database, thus impeding the ability to draw conclusions about trends in species’ spatio-temporal distribution. Hence, the goal of this study is to enhance our understanding of observer-based biases in citizen science for biodiversity monitoring. Toward this goals we: (a) develop a conceptual framework of observers’ decision-making process along the steps of monitor – > record and share, identifying the considerations that take place at each step, specifically highlighting the factors that influence the decisions of whether to record an observation (b) propose an approach for operationalizing the framework using a targeted and focused questionnaire, which gauges observers’ preferences and behavior throughout the decision-making steps, and (c) illustrate the questionnaire’s ability to capture the factors driving observer-based biases by employing data from a local project on the iNaturalist platform. Our discussion highlights the paper’s theoretical contributions and proposes ways in which our approach for semi-structuring unstructured citizen science data could be used to mitigate observer-based biases, potentially making the collected biodiversity data usable for scientific and regulatory purposes.

From Phenology and Habitat Preferences to Climate Change: Importance of Citizen Science in Studying Insect Ecology in the Continental Scale with American Red Flat Bark Beetle, Cucujus clavipes, as a Model Species

Simple Summary

Studies of widely distributed species often are problematic as such research usually needs to engage a lot of time, a large team of field workers, and big financial support before good quality data will be collected. Citizen scientists allow to study different aspects of species biology and ecology with significantly reduced basic operational costs of such studies. Based on the data deposited in the iNaturalist database, we studied the ecology of the American flat bark beetle in the entire area of its species range. The results clearly show high value of citizen science, particularly in studies focused on habitat preferences and phenology in both recognized subspecies of this taxon.

Abstract

The American red flat bark beetle, Cucujus clavipes, is a wide distributed saproxylic species divided into two subspecies: ssp. clavipes restricted to eastern regions of North America and ssp. puniceus occurring only in western regions of this continent. Unique morphological features, including body shape and body coloration, make this species easy to recognize even for amateurs. Surprisingly, except some studies focused on physiological adaptations of the species, the ecology of C. clavipes was almost unstudied. Based on over 500 records collected by citizen scientists and deposited in the iNaturalist data base, we studied phenological activity of adult beetles, habitat preferences and impact of future climate change for both subspecies separately. The results clearly show that spp. clavipes and ssp. puniceus can be characterized by differences in phenology and macrohabitat preferences, and their ranges do not overlap at any point. Spp. clavipes is found as more opportunistic taxon occurring in different forests as well as in urban and agricultural areas with tree vegetation always in elevations below 500 m, while elevational distribution of ssp. puniceus covers areas up to 2300 m, and the beetle was observed mainly in forested areas. Moreover, we expect that climate warming will have negative influence on both subspecies with the possible loss of proper niches at level even up to 47–70% of their actual ranges during next few decades. As the species is actually recognized as unthreatened and always co-occurs with many other species, we suggest, because of its expected future habitat loss, to pay more attention to conservationists for possible negative changes in saproxylic insects and/or forest fauna in North America. In addition, as our results clearly show that both subspecies of C. clavipes differ ecologically, which strongly supports earlier significant morphological and physiological differences noted between them, we suggest that their taxonomical status should be verified by molecular data, because very probably they represent separate species.

An overview of the history, current contributions and future outlook of iNaturalist in Australia

Citizen science initiatives and the data they produce are increasingly common in ecology, conservation and biodiversity monitoring. Although the quality of citizen science data has historically been questioned, biases can be detected and corrected for, allowing these data to become comparable in quality to professionally collected data. Consequently, citizen science is increasingly being integrated with professional science, allowing the collection of data at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. iNaturalist is one of the most popular biodiversity citizen science platforms globally, with more than 1.4 million users having contributed over 54 million observations. Australia is the top contributing nation in the southern hemisphere, and in the top four contributing nations globally, with over 1.6 million observations of over 36000 identified species contributed by almost 27000 users. Despite the platform’s success, there are few holistic syntheses of contributions to iNaturalist, especially for Australia. Here, we outline the history of iNaturalist from an Australian perspective, and summarise, taxonomically, temporally and spatially, Australian biodiversity data contributed to the platform. We conclude by discussing important future directions to maximise the usefulness of these data for ecological research, conservation and policy.