Research stories: Strava, GBIF and Citizen Science

Lead author Caitlin Mandeville recalls how she and her co-authors kept their focus close to home in their latest research that explores connections between citizen science and recreation in natural areas. Just about every community has some small, unassuming natural areas that are mainly known to locals: a neighbourhood park, a small wildlife preserve, a field on the edge of town. These places might not … Continue reading Research stories: Strava, GBIF and Citizen Science

Tanja Petersen: Uncovering biases in Citizen Science data

Photo © Andreas Frisch In this Q&A, we ask author Tanja Petersen about her team’s research on the GBIF database, and find out a little bit more about the author herself. This article is part of the BES cross-journal special feature on Citizen Science. The research What’s your article about? The article is about skews and biases in GBIF data. Specifically, how the origin of … Continue reading Tanja Petersen: Uncovering biases in Citizen Science data

Can ‘Citizen Scientists’ play a valid role in conservation management?

The emergence of citizen science in biodiversity monitoring has transformed the methods by which biodiversity surveys can be conducted. With the recent development of automatic visual identification tools, Pierre Bonnet and colleagues present two distinct case studies implementing citizen science and the use of Pl@ntNet, an automatic plant identification platform. This article is part of the BES cross-journal special feature on Citizen Science. Effective monitoring … Continue reading Can ‘Citizen Scientists’ play a valid role in conservation management?

Can’t see the puffins for the auks? Estimating population size with imperfect species identification

In this post, Alison Johnston (@ali__johnston) talks about her paper published today “Modelling the abundance and distribution of marine birds accounting for uncertain species identification”. Ecological surveys balance the competing goals of data quality and data quantity. We can intensively survey a small area, or cover a larger area with less detail and precision, for example in large-scale citizen science surveys. Recently there has been … Continue reading Can’t see the puffins for the auks? Estimating population size with imperfect species identification