Passive citizen science: The role of social media in wildlife observations

Edwards, Thomas, Jones, Christopher B. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6847-7575, Perkins, Sarah E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7457-2699 and Corcoran, Padraig ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9731-3385 2021. Passive citizen science: The role of social media in wildlife observations. PLoS ONE 16 (8) , e0255416. 10.1371/journal.pone.0255416

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Abstract

Citizen science plays an important role in observing the natural environment. While conventional citizen science consists of organized campaigns to observe a particular phenomenon or species there are also many ad hoc observations of the environment in social media. These data constitute a valuable resource for ‘passive citizen science’—the use of social media that are unconnected to any particular citizen science program, but represent an untapped dataset of ecological value. We explore the value of passive citizen science, by evaluating species distributions using the photo sharing site Flickr. The data are evaluated relative to those submitted to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas, the largest collection of species distribution data in the UK. Our study focuses on the 1500 best represented species on NBN, and common invasive species within UK, and compares the spatial and temporal distribution with NBN data. We also introduce an innovative image verification technique that uses the Google Cloud Vision API in combination with species taxonomic data to determine the likelihood that a mention of a species on Flickr represents a given species. The spatial and temporal analyses for our case studies suggest that the Flickr dataset best reflects the NBN dataset when considering a purely spatial distribution with no time constraints. The best represented species on Flickr in comparison to NBN are diurnal garden birds as around 70% of the Flickr posts for them are valid observations relative to the NBN. Passive citizen science could offer a rich source of observation data for certain taxonomic groups, and/or as a repository for dedicated projects. Our novel method of validating Flickr records is suited to verifying more extensive collections, including less well-known species, and when used in combination with citizen science projects could offer a platform for accurate identification of species and their location.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics Biosciences
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
ISSN:	1932-6203
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 September 2021
Date of Acceptance:	15 July 2021
Last Modified:	15 May 2023 20:36
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/143878

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