Mapping Life – Quality Assessment of Novice vs. Expert Georeferencers

Abstract

The majority of the world's billions of biodiversity specimens are tucked away in museum cabinets with only minimal, if any, digital records of the information they contain. Global efforts to digitize specimens are underway, yet the scale of the task is daunting. Fortunately, many activities associated with digitization do not require extensive training and could benefit from the involvement of citizen science participants. However, the quality of the data generated in this way is not well understood. With two experiments presented here, we examine the efficacy of citizen science participants in georeferencing specimen collection localities. In the absence of an online citizen science georeferencing platform and community, students served as a proxy for the larger citizen science population. At Tulane University and Florida State University, undergraduate students and experts used the GEOLocate platform to georeference fish and plant specimen localities, respectively. Our results provide a first-approximation of what can be expected from citizen science participants with minimal georeferencing training as a benchmark for future innovations. After outliers were removed, the range between student and expert georeferenced points was <1.0 to ca. 40.0 km for both the fish and the plant experiments, with an overall mean of 8.3 km and 4.4 km, respectively. Engaging students in the process improved results beyond GEOLocate's algorithm alone. Calculation of a median point from replicate points improved results further, as did recognition of good georeferencers (e.g., creation of median points contributed by the best 50% of contributors). We provide recommendations for improving accuracy further. We call for the creation of an online citizen science georeferencing platform.

Getting to Know Other Ways of Knowing: Boundary Experiences in Citizen Science

“…Findings from this study confirm and complicate previous recommendations for involving volunteers in natural history digitization projects. Researchers and practitioners have suggested that recruiting volunteers with knowledge of geography and organisms represented in a collection could result in more accurate transcriptions (Ellwood et al 2015;Merckx et al 2018), and that recruiting volunteers through amateur-expert organizations would be one way to connect with individuals who may have such knowledge (Ellwood et al 2016;Merckx et al 2018). This case study provides some evidence that recruiting citizen science volunteers through amateur-expert organizations can lead to the involvement of volunteers with extensive knowledge of local geography.…”

Awareness and use of biodiversity collections by fish biologists

“…Almost all specimens arrive in collections with locality data, although collections staff sometimes need to add missing geographic coordinates. Legacy collections often lack coordinates and georeferencing has become a major activity of collections staff who use platforms such as GEOLocate to georeference large numbers of localities (Ellwood et al ., ; Seltmann et al ., ). Having all localities in a collection geo‐referenced should be a goal of all institutions housing natural history collections.…”

Citizen Science Contributions to Address Biodiversity Loss and Conservation Planning in a Rapidly Developing Region

“…To our knowledge, the only study comparing expert-generated geocoordinates and citizen science-generated geocoordinates, using students as a proxy, discussed differences in the georeferencing process used by each group [34]. Citizen scientists tended to measure the distance from a named place to a location of interest as the crow flies as opposed to measuring distance along a road, as performed by the experts, who also found typos in directions, such as east instead of west [34].…”

“…To our knowledge, the only study comparing expert-generated geocoordinates and citizen science-generated geocoordinates, using students as a proxy, discussed differences in the georeferencing process used by each group [34]. Citizen scientists tended to measure the distance from a named place to a location of interest as the crow flies as opposed to measuring distance along a road, as performed by the experts, who also found typos in directions, such as east instead of west [34]. For the CoGe Arkansas Vascular Flora project, Soteropoulos emphasized the process used by expert georeferencers through realtime georeferencing in a two-hour group training session, reinforced the process through one-on-one training sessions, reiterated the process to answer questions during office hours, and provided citizen scientists with a standard operating procedure to connect the process steps with the CoGe tools (Appendix A).…”

“…Citizen scientists acquire scientific knowledge, such as taxon identification by documenting observations on iNaturalist [10] while contributing to biodiversity research. Local citizen scientists also benefit from giving back to their community [32], and local knowledge improves the quality of transcription and georeferencing in digitizing historic biodiversity records [33,34]. Citizen science is a viable tool to increase biodiversity data availability [11,35].…”