Tag: citizen science

SICB 2020: Collecting Ecological Data from iNaturalist Observations: an Example with Anolis Lizards

Chris Thawley presenting his work at SICB 2020

Citizen science is a collaboration between scientists and the general public to advance scientific research. A major citizen science project is iNaturalist. In iNaturalist, anyone can submit an observation of an organism, which includes the date and location. It provides a database over a large area and a long time that would be extremely costly for scientists alone to collect. However, the data’s suitability for ecological analysis is uncertain.

To shine some light on the robustness of citizen science data, Chris Thawley, a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College, worked in collaboration with Amy Kostka, an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island. When the project was developed, Chris was a postdoc in Jason Kolbe’s lab at the University of Rhode Island. As Amy was unable to go into the field, iNaturalist provided the perfect opportunity for her to experience the research process. They decided to compare established hypotheses of native green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) and invasive brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) against the iNaturalist data. They first coded the anoles’ sex, habitat use, behavior, and morphology, and then compared their coded data against existing hypotheses.

Overall, they found that the iNaturalist data corresponded with existing hypotheses of green and brown anoles. Male brown anoles displayed more frequently than male green anoles, in accordance with results in this paper. Males had broken tails more frequently than females regardless of species, likely due to the more risky behaviors conducted by male anoles than females anoles. Green anoles perched more frequently on natural substrates and perched more frequently in a vertical orientation than brown anoles, in accordance with findings by Stuart et al. (2014). Additionally, the brown and green anoles’ reproductive time period (as measured by when hatchlings emerged) matched with the literature.

iNaturalist is a fantastic tool for individuals who are unable to conduct fieldwork, but still want the research experience. However, Chris pointed out that iNaturalist has spatial biases towards urban areas and temporal biases towards the present day. Additionally, it is necessary to sort and clean the data and to train individuals to standardize coding. This study demonstrates that iNaturalist is still a powerful tool and can be used to estimate phenological patterns, differences between sexes, and corroborate existing hypotheses. Chris hopes that, in the future, iNaturalist could be used to generate new hypotheses.

ESA 2016: Using Citizen Science to Learn about Invasive Anoles

2016-08-09 08.00.41In one of the few anole talks here at the annual Ecology meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, James Stroud presented on a project he conducted with the Fairchild Tropical Botanical GardenJason Kolbe, and others. Together, they organized a large citizen science project engaging middle-school aged students to collect distribution and abundance data about anoles in the Southern Miami region in a program they call “Lizards on the Loose.”

In this outreach project, James and colleagues had 101 schools participate in collecting data. Armed with a handy anole ID guide created by Jason Kolbe and a video by James explaining anole biology and species differences, students and teachers set out to conduct 15 minute visual surveys. On these surveys, they recorded how many animals they encountered, the species ID, and the approximate body size using a provided standardized collection protocol and entering data into a Google forms site.

The results were overwhelming: more than 1,000 students conducted a total of 1,356 surveys resulting in 12,000+ lizard observations! This project produced massive amounts of data on very short time frames. In general, distribution patterns fell as they were expected to, although some records certainly hint at some mis-identification (e.g. some A. cristatellus locations). Unsurprisingly, the least abundant lizards were those that were hardest to detect: the species typically found high in trees.

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While the resulting dataset is impressively large, James admits that there are data quality issues with collecting data in this manner and asked for input on how to improve data collection. Specifically, he suggested that in the future they would like to incorporate photographic and smartphone GPS information, perhaps via an app. Does anyone have any suggestions for James on implementing such an app or otherwise improving the design?

James emphasized that providing meaningful natural experiences with wildlife for kids is good for conservation, fosters an appreciation for nature and helps inspire the next generation of scientists. Many of our readers may find inspiration from the success of this program and we would love to hear about it if you implement similar types of citizen science projects with anoles!

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