Stronger together: different community science platforms all contribute to wildlife research

Abstract

Context

Engaging the general public can increase spatio-temporal coverage of wildlife monitoring. Given the potentially substantial costs, we need to evaluate the contribution of known and planned initiatives and confirm whether multiple platforms increase the efficiency of data collection. As observer behaviour affects data quantity and quality, users of specialised and generalist platforms are expected to behave differently, resulting in more connected networks for specialised and higher nestedness for generalist platforms. Specialist observers are expected to contribute a balanced ratio of rare and common species, whereas non-specialist contribution will depend more on species detectability.

Aims

We aim to evaluate whether the combined contribution of observers from different platforms can improve the quality of occurrence and distribution data of 218 endemic Atlantic Forest bird species in Brazil. We also describe and compare observer-bird species interaction networks to illustrate observer behaviour on different platforms.

Methods

On the basis of data from five community science platforms in Brazil, namely, eBird, WikiAves, Biofaces, iNaturalist and Táxeus, we compared the spatial distribution of bird observations, the number of observers, the presence of the same observers on various platforms, bird species coverage, and the proportion of duplicate observations within and among platforms.

Key results

Although species coverage of the joint dataset increased by up to 100%, spatial completeness among the five platforms was low. The network of individual platforms had low values of clustering, and the network of the joint dataset had low connectance and high nestedness.

Conclusions

Each platform had a somewhat unique contribution. Pooling these datasets and integrating them with standardised data can inform our knowledge on bird distributions and trends in this fragile biome. Nevertheless, we encourage observers to provide precise coordinates, dates and other data (and platforms to accommodate such data) and recommend submitting data from all platforms into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility to support wildlife research and conservation.

Implications

If new platforms engage more and different people, new initiatives can cover poorly represented areas and successfully expand monitoring effort for Atlantic Forest endemic bird species.