A social media fix to the Wallacean shortfall

Abstract

Citizen science programmes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular among those with an interest in natural history, but remain the domain of a relatively small portion of the public and heavily biased toward certain areas. Although systematic recording of biodiversity data has been practiced for centuries in the Global North, many tropical nations are still vastly under-surveyed. Yet with the explosive popularity of social media, and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphone cameras, millions of people are posting photographs on social media daily. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these data to enhance our biodiversity understanding using Bangladesh, a megadiverse South Asian nation, as a case study. We compared biodiversity records extracted from Facebook with those from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) collating geospatial records for 1,013 unique species, including 970 species from Facebook (representing 25% of observation records) and 712 species in GBIF (representing 75% of observation records). While a vast proportion of the combined spatial data were biased towards major cities, Facebook records were more evenly spatially distributed compared to those from GBIF. About 86% of the available distribution records on threatened species were from Facebook, whereas GBIF records were almost entirely of Least Concern species. Our results reveal that social media archives can contain biodiversity data that far eclipses that available from formal databases in terms of volume, and also complements formal data both taxonomically and spatially. A key research priority now is the development of mechanisms for extracting and interpreting social media biodiversity data.

Trends and progress in studying butterfly migration

“…Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there can be both migratory and non‐migratory populations and individuals within a species (Slager & Malcolm, 2015; Zanden et al, 2018; Zhan et al, 2014). To understand seasonal movements, it is essential to monitor across a species' full geographic distribution, a task for which active citizen science participation can be highly beneficial (Chowdhury, Aich, et al, 2022; Jarić et al, 2020; Juhász et al, 2020; Mason et al, 2018; Soroye et al, 2018; Chowdhury, Braby, et al 2021, Chowdhury, Alam, et al 2021). For example, both amateur and professional ornithologists widely use eBird, which has transformed the availability of bird data globally (Amano, Lamming, et al, 2016; Bonney et al, 2009; Sullivan et al, 2009).…”

“…So how can we engage citizen science in the tropics? Nowadays, iNaturalist, a citizen science project, is increasingly popular both among professional and amateur naturalists (Callaghan et al, 2020; Chowdhury, Aich, et al, 2022; Schuttler et al, 2018). Citizen science tools, such as this, can widen the coverage of space and species in data collection; and collating and analysing the resulting data will help to identify which species are, in fact, migratory.…”

Using social media records to inform conservation planning

“…Second, we collected species distribution records from Facebook from our previous work (Chowdhury, Aich, et al., 2022), following the method described by Chowdhury, Ahmed, et al. (2023).…”

“…Citizen science is playing a vital role in reducing global biodiversity knowledge gaps (Callaghan et al., 2021, 2022; Chandler et al., 2017; Di Minin et al., 2015; Pocock et al, 2019), and, even in Europe, around 80−90% of biodiversity observational records are collected by dedicated volunteers (Schmeller et al., 2009). Amateur (and professional) naturalists are increasingly taking advantage of expanded internet coverage and the photographic capacity of mobile devices to share their observations online (Andrachuk et al., 2019; Chowdhury, Ahmed, et al., 2023; Chowdhury, Aich, et al., 2023; Marcenò et al., 2021; O'Neill et al., 2023). Consequently, the amount of biodiversity data from citizen science in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is sharply increasing, although its data are biased toward Europe and North America (Hughes et al., 2021).…”

“…Consequently, the amount of biodiversity data from citizen science in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is sharply increasing, although its data are biased toward Europe and North America (Hughes et al., 2021). Due to the increasing popularity of social media (e.g., Facebook, Flickr), millions of people post photographs that contain biodiversity information (Chowdhury, Ahmed, et al., 2023; Chowdhury, Aich, et al., 2023; Toivonen et al., 2019). If these biodiversity observation records can also be captured and mobilized, this could enhance existing knowledge of tropical species distributions and vastly improve conservation assessments (Chowdhury, Aich, et al., 2023; Jarić et al., 2020; Toivonen et al., 2019).…”