Tag: Citizen Science Data

Robert May Prize

The Data Double Standard: how this article came to be

Post provided by Alison Binley As a new Master’s student at Carleton University, I was excited to learn the ins and outs of using community science data (also known commonly as citizen science, participatory research, and crowd-sourced data) to conduct conservation research. I was working on estimating population trends using eBird, a popular, opportunistic community science platform that collects data on birds, and fascinated by … Continue reading The Data Double Standard: how this article came to be

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Conservation and management

Using citizen science data to track migratory shorebird populations

Post provided by Sam Nicol (He/Him)

Are you an eBirder who loves waders? Do you ever wonder where the birds that you see go after you’ve studiously uploaded your counts to the database? It’s a good question, and in the past, it has been surprisingly hard to answer. In this post, Sam Nicol discusses how citizen science is being used to investigate bird migration.

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Unknown's avatarBen Whittaker1 Comment
Robert May Prize

Spatial thinning and class balancing: Key choices lead to variation in the performance of species distribution models with citizen science data

Post provided by Valerie Steen

Each year Methods in Ecology and Evolution awards the Robert May Prize to the best paper published in the journal by an author at the start of their career. Ten Early Career Researchers made the shortlist for this year’s prize, including Valerie Steen who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Oregon State University in the USA. In this interview, Valerie shares insights on her paper ‘Spatial thinning and class balancing: Key choices lead to variation in the performance of species distribution models with citizen science data’.

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Unknown's avatarBen WhittakerLeave a comment
Methods 10th Anniversary

10th Anniversary Volume 5: Extracting Signals of Change from Noisy Ecological Data

Post provided by Nick J. B. Isaac

To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the launch of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we are highlighting an article from each volume to feature in the Methods.blog.

For Volume 5, we have selected ‘Statistics for citizen science: extracting signals of change from noisy ecological data’ by Isaac et al. (2014).  In this post, the authors discuss the background and key concepts of the article, and the application of the article for assessing biodiversity occurrence datasets.

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Code and Applications, Meetings, Society

Ideas Brought to Life Through BES Hackathon

Post provided by Tom August

Introduction to the Hackathon

Hackathon participants with their awards.

Hackathons have become a regular feature in the data-science world. Get a group of people with a shared interest together, give them data, food, and a limited amount of time and see what they can produce (often with prizes to be won). Translated into the world of academia as research hackathons, these events are a fantastic way to foster collaboration, interdisciplinary working and skills sharing.

The Quantitative Ecology hackathon was an intense day of coding resulting in creative and innovative research ideas using social and ecological data. Teams worked through the day to develop their ideas with support from experts in R, open science and statistics. We ended up with five projects addressing questions from, ‘Who has the least access to nature?’ to ‘Where should citizen scientists go to collect new data?’.

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Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment
Conservation and management, Methods papers

Being Certain about Uncertainty: Can We Trust Data from Citizen Science Programs?

Post provided by VIVIANA RUIZ GUTIERREZ

Citizen Science: A Growing Field

Thousands of volunteers around the world work on Citizen Science projects. ©GlacierNPS
Thousands of volunteers around the world work on Citizen Science projects. ©GlacierNPS

As you read this, thousands of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds are collecting information for over 1,100 citizen science projects worldwide. These projects cover a broad range of topics: from volunteers collecting samples of the microbes in their digestive tracts, to tourists providing images of endangered species (such as tigers) that are often costly to survey.

The popularity of citizen science initiatives has been increasing exponentially in the past decade, and the wealth of knowledge being contributed is overwhelming. For example, almost 300,000 participants have submitted around 300 million bird observations from 252 countries worldwide to the eBird program since 2002. Amazingly, rates of submissions have exceeded 9.5 million observations in a single month! Continue reading “Being Certain about Uncertainty: Can We Trust Data from Citizen Science Programs?”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson9 Comments