Identifying engaging bird species and traits with community science observations

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.