Exploring snake occurrence records: Spatial biases and marginal gains from accessible social media

Abstract

A species’ distribution provides fundamental information on: climatic niche, biogeography, and conservation status. Species distribution models often use occurrence records from biodiversity databases, subject to spatial and taxonomic biases. Deficiencies in occurrence data can lead to incomplete species distribution estimates. We can incorporate other data sources to supplement occurrence datasets. The general public is creating (via GPS-enabled cameras to photograph wildlife) incidental occurrence records that may present an opportunity to improve species distribution models. We investigated (1) occurrence data of a cryptic group of animals: non-marine snakes, in a biodiversity database (Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)) and determined (2) whether incidental occurrence records extracted from geo-tagged social media images (Flickr) could improve distribution models for 18 tropical snake species. We provide R code to search for and extract data from images using Flickr’s API. We show the biodiversity database’s 302,386 records disproportionately originate from North America, Europe and Oceania (250,063, 82.7%), with substantial gaps in tropical areas that host the highest snake diversity. North America, Europe and Oceania averaged several hundred records per species; whereas Asia, Africa and South America averaged less than 35 per species. Occurrence density showed similar patterns; Asia, Africa and South America have roughly ten-fold fewer records per 100 km2than other regions. Social media provided 44,687 potential records. However, including them in distribution models only marginally impacted niche estimations; niche overlap indices were consistently over 0.9. Similarly, we show negligible differences in Maxent model performance between models trained using GBIF-only and Flickr-supplemented datasets. Model performance appeared dependent on species, rather than number of occurrences or training dataset. We suggest that for tropical snakes, accessible social media currently fails to deliver appreciable benefits for estimating species distributions; but due to the variation between species and the rapid growth in social media data, may still be worth considering in future contexts.

Sharing for science: high-resolution trophic interactions revealed rapidly by social media

“…Importantly, our work is part of a growing recognition of the remarkable power of social media and citizen science to gather biological information (reviewed by Toivonen et al, 2019 and Jarić et al., 2020 ). Although a number of studies have made use of digital media platforms (i.e., not specifically designed for citizen science) to better understand the geographic and temporal distribution of biological traits or organisms ( Leighton et al, 2016 ; Jiménez-Valverde et al., 2019 ; Marshall & Strine, 2019 ), other studies have started to detail ecological and evolutionary processes explicitly. Google Images has been used to quantify insect-pollinator relationships ( Bahlai & Landis, 2016 ), commensalism-like relationships between birds and large mammals ( Mikula et al, 2018 ), to assess the diets of predatory birds ( Mikula et al, 2016 ; Naude et al, 2019 ), and the diets of predatory insects ( Hernandez, Masonick & Weirauch, 2019 ).…”

Dactylogyridae 2022: a meta-analysis of phylogenetic studies and generic diagnoses of parasitic flatworms using published genetic and morphological data

“…This pattern mirrors the citation biases observed in other fields such as behavioural biology (see, Taborsky, 2009). Promotion on social media might address this shortfall but can likely not fully compensate for this bias (Peoples et al, 2016;Marshall and Strine, 2019). Furthermore, confirmation biases might affect which taxa are included in phylogenetic studies as prior expectations of researchers could affect taxon selection (see Jermiin et al, 2020).…”

Validating the Two Records of Mocquard’s Swampsnake, Tretanorhinus mocquardi Bocourt 1891 (Dipsadidae), in Colombia, with Comments on the Taxonomy of Mainland Swampsnakes

“…Colombian records include Striped Swampsnakes (T. taeniatus) from along the Pacific Coast (Dunn 1939;Peters and Orejas-Miranda 1970;Wallach et al 2014) and Mocquard's Swampsnakes (T. mocquardi) that correspond to two specimens deposited in the Museo de Herpetología Universidad de Antioquia (MHUA), Medellín, Colombia, and which are listed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (Daza 2018). Although T. mocquardi is a species expected to occur in Colombia since its known distribution includes Panama and Ecuador (Cisneros-Heredia 2005), its presence has not been recorded in the literature and information regarding the two presumptive records might contain uncertainties (Maldonado et al 2015;Marshall and Strine 2019;Chapman et al 2020). Data from online databases must be curated both taxonomically and geographically to guarantee reliability (Marshall and Strine 2019).…”

“…Although T. mocquardi is a species expected to occur in Colombia since its known distribution includes Panama and Ecuador (Cisneros-Heredia 2005), its presence has not been recorded in the literature and information regarding the two presumptive records might contain uncertainties (Maldonado et al 2015;Marshall and Strine 2019;Chapman et al 2020). Data from online databases must be curated both taxonomically and geographically to guarantee reliability (Marshall and Strine 2019).…”