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It’s time to embrace the abundance of citizen science: Assessing Great Lakes biodiversity with CitSci.
Citation:
Hollenhorst, T. It’s time to embrace the abundance of citizen science: Assessing Great Lakes biodiversity with CitSci. International Association for Great Lakes Research, Brockport, NY, June 10 - 14, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Citizen science activities and application have increased exponentially in recent years. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity as we develop ways to effectively harness all this information in a useful way. Here we explore the potential of citizen science data as provided by various providers including the Global Biodiversity information Facility to assess and identify biodiversity and citizen science participation across the Great Lakes basin.
Description:
Citizen science activities and applications have increased by leaps in bounds in recent years, propelled by many different local, state, and federal initiatives. Electronic platforms for citizen science combined with social media have provided for explosive growth of sites like E-Bird, I-naturalist, Citsci.org, SciStarter and many other applications that support citizen science. About this time the Association of Citizen Science was formed along with establishing the first peer reviewed journal for citizen science starting in 2016. In 2001 the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GPIF.org) was established to provide to provide an open-source platform to share information about where and when species have been recorded. Data sources range from museum specimens collected long ago to geotagged smartphone photos and observations shared by citizen scientist. To date GPIF curates more than 1 trillion species occurrence observations from around the world. This project assessed more than 30 million GPIF occurrence records that exist for WI, MN, MI and Ontario, and summarizes those that were observed from within the Lake Superior watershed. We’ll discuss this abundance of citizen science data, most common sources, and how these data can be used to identify hotspots of biodiversity and citizen science participation across the Great Lakes basin.