Open AccessIdentifying engaging bird species and traits with community science observations
Author(s) -
Sara Stoudt,
Benjamin R. Goldstein,
Perry de Valpine
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.011
H-Index - 771
eISSN - 1091-6490
pISSN - 0027-8424
DOI - 10.1073/pnas.2110156119
Subject(s) - outreach , citizen science , charisma , megafauna , data collection , data science , ecology , geography , biology , computer science , sociology , political science , botany , law , social science , archaeology , pleistocene
Significance Conservation outreach has long depended on an intuitive sense of which species are more “charismatic” or engaging, for example, placing focus on certain charismatic megafauna in advertising materials. Online community science databases like eBird and iNaturalist provide records of how people engage with different birds under differing data collection protocols. Comparisons between the two databases reveal biases in bird reporting rates. Larger, more colorful, and rarer birds are preferentially engaged with opportunistically in iNaturalist records compared to more systematic eBird records. These relationships and the species-specific engagement indexes determined from these data can be applied to conservation and outreach efforts to help foster a public relationship with nature and can be used to improve models using these two databases.