scholarly journals A decade of the India Biodiversity Portal: Planning ahead with technology to enhance citizen science participation in India

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Vattakaven ◽  
Harikrishnan Surendran ◽  
Prabhakar Rajagopal
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Science ◽  
Species Distribution ◽  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Alien Invasive Species ◽  
Observation Data ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Distribution Maps ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
The Web

The India Biodiversity Portal (IBP) was initiated a decade ago, aiming to aggregate data on all species within India. The portal has been running a citizen science module for the past 8 years, aggregating observation data from the general public. The portal runs many flagship citizen science campaigns, such as the Neighborhood Trees Campaign, National Moth Week, Spotting Alien Invasive species, Mapping Indian Snails and Slugs and Frogwatch. We have learnt valuable lessons in harnessing participation in citizen science, implementing functionality and in integrating technological advancements into the platform codebase. Following up on these, we are implementing new features that will streamline development, entice users and further spur participation. We discuss some of the proposed changes and our justification, including the impacts we expect in generating better citizen science data. A key lesson arising out of our campaigns in remote regions of India, where internet penetration is relatively new, is that most users are connected to the web exclusively through a mobile device. Most do not have access to a personal computer or an email account. Yet they are internet savvy and use mobile applications to accomplish complex tasks such as banking activities, often logging in and being authenticated exclusively through a mobile number. We are implementing short-messaging-service (SMS) or one-time password-based login mechanisms, for login even without an email account for authentication. Although many initiatives have been investing in platform-specific mobile apps to cater to a growing mobile user community, maintaining and updating multiple mobile apps alongside enhancements to the web version is a resource-intensive task that most platforms cannot afford. Inconsistency in functions and usability across different versions of the same platform may lead to gaps in data collection. To address this challenge and streamline development, we have begun updating the portal codebase to enable Progressive Web Apps, which will replace conventional mobile applications while also serving as Single Page Applications that provide a unified experience across device platforms and alleviating the need for updating mobile apps separately. For existing contributors on the portal, comparisons of their contributions against other users are a motivating factor to contribute further. Leaderboards and reputation systems are proven methods to promote activity and provide recognition to participants. Such leaderboards also incentivise newer participants to emulate leaders and climb the boards. We are building a reputation system that not only recognizes quantity but also the quality of the user’s contribution. In addition, we are working on integrating intelligent push notification technology that will constantly engage users by keeping them abreast of activity related to content reflecting their interest on the portal. These features are expected to engage contributors and keep them motivated towards further data contributions. Finally, the most rewarding outcome from contributing citizen science data is in visualizing its impact. The most obvious are improvements in species distribution maps that are generated for each species page on the portal. Users are greatly motivated by contributing data that may enhance known distributions and may constitute range extensions for a species. Distribution maps on the portal are being revamped so that information is presented to the user in real-time through visualisations that are are both attractive and easy to interpret. These will provide users with gratification and help spur participation further. IBP is also instituting the ability to automate the classification of its data to identify publication-grade data. Through a combination of user’s reputation and other data quality criteria, the data on IBP will be automatically graded, allowing such data to be pushed to Global Biodiversity Information Facility on a periodic basis as a Darwin Core Archive, contributing to global biodiversity data.

scholarly journals The impact of data quality filtering of opportunistic citizen science data on species distribution model performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 444 ◽  
pp. 109453
Author(s):  
Camille Van Eupen ◽  
Dirk Maes ◽  
Marc Herremans ◽  
Kristijn R.R. Swinnen ◽  
Ben Somers ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Quality ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Species Distribution ◽  
Species Distribution Model ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
Distribution Model ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Quality Filtering ◽  
The Impact

scholarly journals Integrating citizen science data with expert surveys increases accuracy and spatial extent of species distribution models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
O.J. Robinson ◽  
V. Ruiz-Gutierrez ◽  
M.D. Reynolds ◽  
G.H. Golet ◽  
M. Strimas-Mackey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Species Distribution ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Habitat Associations ◽  
Biological Information ◽  
Ecological Knowledge ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractInformation on species’ habitat associations and distributions, across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, are a fundamental source of ecological knowledge. However, collecting biological information at relevant scales if often cost prohibitive, although it is essential for framing the broader context of more focused research and conservation efforts. Citizen-science data has been signaled as an increasingly important source of biological information needed to fill in data gaps needed to make more comprehensive and robust inferences on species distributions. However, there are perceived trade-offs of combining highly structured, scientific survey data with largely unstructured, citizen-science data. As a result, the focus of most methodological advances to combine these sources of information has been on treating these sources as independent. The degree to which each source of information is allowed to directly inform a common underlying process (e.g. species distribution) depends on the perceived quality of the data. In this paper, we explore these trade-offs by applying a simplified approach of filtering citizen-science data to resemble structured survey data, and analyze both sources of data under a common framework. To accomplish this, we explored ways of integrating high-resolution survey data on shorebirds in the northern Central Valley of California with observations in eBird for the entire region that were filtered to improve their quality. The integration of survey data with the filtered citizen-science data in eBird resulted in improved inference and predictive ability, and increased the extent and accuracy of inferences on shorebirds for the Central Valley. The structured surveys were found to improve the overall accuracy of ecological inference based only on citizen-science data, by increasing the representation of data collected from high quality habitats for shorebirds (e.g. rice fields). The practical approach we have shown for data integration can be also be used to improve the efficiency of designing biological surveys in the context of larger, citizen-science monitoring efforts, ultimately reducing the financial and time expenditures typically required of monitoring programs and focused research. The simple processing and filtering method we present can be used to integrate other types of data (e.g. camera traps) with more localized efforts (e.g. research projects), ultimately improving our ecological knowledge on the distribution and habitat associations of species of conservation concern worldwide.

The Greenspace Bird Calculator: a citizen-driven tool for monitoring avian biodiversity in urban greenspaces

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-476
Author(s):  
Corey T. Callaghan ◽  
John H. Wilshire ◽  
John M. Martin ◽  
Richard E. Major ◽  
Mitchell B. Lyons ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
Citizen Science ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Bird Diversity ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Urban Greenspaces ◽  
Avian Biodiversity ◽  
Web App ◽  
The Web

Urbanisation is altering local flora and fauna, but urban greenspaces can provide refugia for a variety of taxa. However, we often lack basic biodiversity information (e.g., species richness) for these urban greenspaces. Citizen science projects are continuously improving our understanding of ecology at broad temporal and spatial scales. But, many conservation-relevant decisions are idiosyncratic and made at small management scales (e.g., local government). Given a general bias of citizen science data towards areas with large human populations, citizen scientists are best placed to contribute to improving our understanding of the biodiversity within cities and urban greenspaces. We introduce the Greenspace Bird Calculator: a web-app aimed at enhancing our collective knowledge of bird diversity in urban greenspaces. Users of the web-app could be land managers seeking to understand the bird diversity in the greenspaces they manage. It is built in a reproducible workflow, allowing anyone to delineate a greenspace and submit it to the web-app administrator, receiving an output comprising the greenspace’s total bird diversity. The Greenspace Bird Calculator web-app provides an automated tool to utilise existing eBird citizen science data to calculate species richness for urban greenspaces globally. Critically, the GBC web-app statistically assesses available data that otherwise would be unlikely to be considered by decision-makers. This web-app is an example of the evolution of citizen science, whereby the data collected has been analysed to allow accessible interpretation and inclusion into urban greenspace management and planning.

scholarly journals GIS Mapping and Distribution of Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus) in India by Using Citizen Science Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumar Adesh ◽  
Sinha Ankit ◽  
Kanaujia Amita
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Science ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Distribution Patterns ◽  
Habitat Modeling ◽  
Gis Mapping ◽  
Science Data ◽  
Distribution Maps ◽  
Pavo Cristatus ◽  
The Status

The Indian peacock or Blue peafowl (Pavo cristatus.), the largest of the pheasants commonly called Mor or Mayur, is a bird species recognized for its beauty. Pavo cristatus (Indian peafowl) has been justifiably declared as the National Bird of India in 1963. In India, it is given the ultimate protection by its inclusion in the Schedule I of Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The main objective is to encourage citizen participation in generating baseline information using sight records and enable long-term monitoring of Indian peafowl in India. The present study deals with the status and distribution of Indian peafowl in India and the data used is taken from the citizen science database of eBird. The complete dataset of Indian peafowl from 2001-2017 was used to prepare the distribution maps in different years as well as to obtain information on the species' location, and the number of a social group in India. Some potential reported sites were verified during 2013–2017 by visiting the distinct locations. From 2001 to 2017 we found 71,632 records from 15,151 contributors across 26 states/union territories of India. Percentage of individuals observed was 38% (in 2017), 27% (in 2016) and 16% (in 2015) whereas 0% was recorded in 2002, 2006 and 2007. The citizen science data obtained thus has the potential for increasing our understanding of current peafowl distribution patterns, and for categorizing important sites for conservation/protections and to perform occupancy and habitat modeling of Indian peafowl species in India.

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