Improving citizen science as a tool biodiversity monitoring

Abstract

Citizen science, i.e. the engagement of non-scientists in research, had an impressive development in the last few years. Some scientific questions can only be addressed with the involvement of a huge number of data collectors and analysers. The effort of such work based on professionals hampers the feasibility of some experiments. Consequently, involving volunteer citizens in monitoring and research programs (so called citizen science projects) is a growing activity in many countries and is expanding to new scientific areas. International treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species identify the necessity to evaluate change in the status and trends of global biodiversity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services also has as one of its four main functions to perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity. Therefore, citizen science can be seen as a tool to monitor biodiversity change at regional and global level. This thesis addresses five main research questions: What is the social context of a citizen science project and what points should be taken into consideration when designing a citizen science project?; What are the current and the potential benefits and limitations, for different citizen groups, in participating in a project of citizen science for registering biodiversity, using as a casestudy BioDiversity4All —a Portuguese biodiversity citizen science project?; What are the main intrinsic motivations to participate in citizen science projects?; What are the variables that drive the locations where users are making observations?; Can we use citizen science data to estimate climatic niches and species distributions? The first part of the research provides the social context of citizen science projects, exploring briefly the history of citizen science and identifying the main stakeholders involved in these projects. This chapter analyses the main points to take into consideration, from the perspectives of these different stakeholders, when designing a citizen science project. It is fundamental that project design acknowledges the existence of social trade-offs like: deciding the scope and scale of the project; deciding to keep small, with local data control, closer to the volunteers and community issues, or connecting with larger initiatives to benefit data usage; focusing more on guaranteeing data quality with the collection of rigorous, reliable data gathered in a systematized way, or on the easiness of producing data, with higher benefits to data volume, environmental education and engagement. When management decisions and scientific research outcomes are expected to arise from the project, verifiable and reliable data is essential. This requirement is also important to attract more scientists to citizen science projects. Being explicit about the goals of the project is fundamental to avoid misunderstanding of expectations and outcomes of stakeholders. Planning carefully the design of a citizen science contributes to the increased success of such initiatives. This work is proceeded by an analysis of the current and potential benefits of biodiversity registering, and as well as its limitations, for different societal groups (from individual citizens to large companies). One overall benefit is that this ultimately contributes to an increased societal knowledge about natural values, an improved biodiversity-related education and higher environment and conservation awareness. This analysis is based on the experience of the BioDiversity4All project. In Portugal, there is a significant lack of tradition on biodiversity observations and citizen science. In this context, identifying distinct citizen groups to whom a project like BioDiversity4All could be beneficial, proved to be an important task, since recruiting can be more difficult to achieve than in other countries, where established citizen science habits facilitate recruiting and participation. A bottom-up approach, with customized communication and engagement strategies, seems essential to recruit and retain citizen groups’ interest in the initiative. The next part of this research is to study the main motivations for the participation of citizens in a citizen science project, in Portugal, and assess the pattern of motivations across different groups of users. Analysing survey respondents registered in BioDiversity4All, the majority have higher education and low level of participation. Relatedness with the project is the motivational category most valued. Other categories, like Value/Usefulness and Group Relatedness are more important for users that participate more. Working carefully on people’s involvement is fundamental to increase and maintain their participation on citizen science projects. In the following chapter, the effect of geographic variables on the observations registered in BioDiversity4All, among different taxonomical groups, is compared. This study, showed as expected, the bias that opportunistic citizen science databases may have. Some areas of the country are highly covered by observations, compared to others, a limited number of participants is responsible for most of the observations, and there are differences in the number of observations throughout the year. Considering the variables selected, most of them reflect accessibility such as altitude, density of roads, or density of paths. Despite the variation between groups we could identify some patterns. Path density was the variable that showed significant importance for seven of the eight taxonomic groups. In contrast with other studies, density of paths explained more variation than the density of roads in taxa distribution records. The last part of the research assesses whether opportunistic citizen science databases are viable data sources to use in the modelling of species distributions and test if species attributes can indicate the reliability and completeness of the opportunistic distribution data. The analysis of sampling of species’ climatic niches based on citizen science records from BioDiversity4All was performed and compared with scientific records. The results obtained varied greatly among different herptile species, the ones used in this analysis, which is not unexpected because, as in most biological groups, herptile species differ greatly in terms of elusiveness and secludedness, which leads to a variation in detectability and ease of identification in the natural environment. For some species, distribution models presented good predictive performances, highly similar between models using citizen science data and those using data from a scientific database, despite a lower average performance of the former. The results suggest that opportunistic citizen science databases of species observations can represent a viable alternative to scientific records when these are not available, and the challenge might be to combine different data sources to achieve better results. A final contribution of this research is the presentation of future research avenues in this area. The future of citizen science studies seems to be highly related with digital technology improvements with low cost collection and storage of big data, complex analysis of this data and personalization of applications and projects to suit each person’s interests and motivations to participate. “Gamification”, or the trend of incorporating game-like elements in project design to foster participation, motivation and engagement, is also becoming a popular research are being used in several different scopes including citizen science, being expected an increased use in the following years. Another area to be develop in the future concerns scientists’ motivations to participate in citizen science projects that should also be better understood. Citizen science programs an the development of coordinated capacity building initiatives can be good approaches to develop biodiversity monitoring programs. The adoption of common and standardized protocols in citizen science projects could help to use these data in monitoring programs. Studies on the robustness of data quality and on the evaluation of the statistical analysis better adapted to the specific characteristics of citizen science projects are important to give support to the use of the data collected, once they can reduce the sampling error, allowing a better balance between quantity and quality of data collected.