Data & Apps ///
“I’m always really cautious when I start talking about citizen science as a thing,” says Michael Pocock, an ecologist at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, co-chair of the British Ecological Society’s Citizen Science Group and a board member of the U.s.-based Citizen Science Association. “It’s absolutely not a thing. It’s an incredibly diverse range of approaches, all of which are clustered under this term of convenience of citizen science.”
Several years ago, Pocock led a study that tried to categorize all the existing citizen science projects in ecology and the environment. They came up with a total of more than 500. “You could probably quadruple the dataset by now, at least,” he says.
It’s not just journals publishing more studies based on citizen science projects. In 2016, the Citizen Science Association launched Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, which reflects a growing need among practitioners for how-to material. In the U.K., the British Ecological Society just held a call for papers in a similar vein to run across its entire six-journal catalogue.
But it’s in the data that things are really taking off. Leslie Ries, whose main research focus is butterflies, agrees. “In the last three or four years, [citizen science] hit this big exponential curve,” she says. “The amount of data gain every year is in orders of magnitude!”
One of the most telling developments there — and an integral part of the citizen science story — is the growth of ebird and inaturalist, the two largest biodiversityfocused, crowdsourced citizen science platforms. Both invite users, experts and non-experts alike, to post observations (inaturalist requires photos, ebird does not), which are then vetted by a combination of human experts and AI technology.
Users of ebird — which launched with coverage of the western hemisphere in 2002, then went global in 2010 — entered 140 million sightings in 2019. Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, it’s a hub for birders to track and record personal checklists linked to location, explore others’ posts, study distributions and learn about birds. Site administrators also archive the data and, once vetted, make it available for research.
inaturalist began as a master’s project at UC Berkeley in 2008 and took off when its early developers partnered with, first, the California Academy of Sciences in 2014 and then the National Geographic Society, in 2017. In the past five years, the number of observations has roughly doubled each year, with more than 14 million new sightings submitted in 2019. The Canadian branch (inaturalist.ca) is the result of a collaboration between the CWF (along with its Hinterland Who’s Who program) and Natureservecanada, Parks Canada and Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum working with inaturalist and the California Academy of Sciences. As a result, Canadians contributed more to its growth last year (15.4 per cent) than users in any country outside of the U.S.
As the names suggest, ebird is strictly for birds while inaturalist’s scope includes all plants and animals. More than 169,000 different species were entered on the latter’s site last year. It puts identification front and centre: users post photos and their locations, and the site’s impressive AI photo recognition system returns a list of the most likely matches. For an observation to be considered research grade, the identification must also be validated by human experts on the site.
While ebird has many more observations, inaturalist is gaining much greater traction as a source of research data. In 2019, some 219 scientific studies relied on inaturalist data; for ebird, it was 58. (continued)