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Automating the use of citizen scientists’ biodiversity surveys in iNaturalist to facilitate early detection of species’ responses to climate change

Dates

Release Date
2017-10-01

Summary

A BioBlitz is a field survey method for finding and documenting as many species as possible in a specific area over a short period. The National Park Service and National Geographic Society hosted the largest BioBlitz survey ever in 2016; people in more than 120 national parks used the iNaturalist app on mobile devices to document organisms they observed. Resulting records have Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, include biological accuracy assessments, and provide an unprecedented snapshot of biodiversity nationwide. Additional processing and analysis would make these data available to inform conservation and management decisions. This project developed a process to integrate iNaturalist data with existing species lists from [...]

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“Graphic depicting TaxaTaxi Computer Code”
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Project Extension

projectProducts
productDescriptionOne manuscript that will be a methods paper about the R-scripts tool (nickamed “TaxaTaxi”) developed through this proposal and demonstration of it using iNaturalist and NPSpecies and the potential to expand beyond these datasets
statusExpected
productDescriptionOne manuscript that will describe the findings from comparison of the 2016 NPS BioBlitz results in iNaturalist with NPSpecies with a focus on all newly-documented species, how many were outside their known range, and the implications for climate change understanding of these taxa and regions. An appendix in this manuscript will include all species’ mismatch information from the data integration.
statusExpected
productDescriptionRecords subset from iNaturalist during this process will all have geographic coordinates and can be easily provided as shapefiles, and these will all be available in ScienceBase
statusExpected
productDescriptionThe code and relevant user guides for TaxaTaxi will be available via GitHub and a USGS Bitbucket Repository
statusExpected
projectStatusCompleted

Graphic depicting TaxaTaxi Computer Code
Graphic depicting TaxaTaxi Computer Code

Communities

  • Community for Data Integration (CDI)

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