Decision-making of citizen scientists when recording species observations.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Bowler DE
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9245884 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Citizen science is an increasingly popular way of engaging volunteers in the collection of scientific data. Despite this, data quality remains a concern and there is little published evidence about the accuracy of records generated by citizen scientists. Here we compare data generated by two British citizen science projects, Blooms for Bees and BeeWatch, to determine the ability of volunteer recorders to identify bumblebee (Bombus) species. We assessed recorders' identification ability in two ways-as recorder accuracy (the proportion of expert-verified records correctly identified by recorders) and recorder success (the proportion of recorder-submitted identifications confirmed correct by verifiers). Recorder identification ability was low (<50% accuracy; <60% success), despite access to project specific bumblebee identification materials. Identification ability varied significantly depending on bumblebee species, with recorders most able to correctly identify species with distinct appearances. Blooms for Bees recorders (largely recruited from the gardening community) were markedly less able to identify bumblebees than BeeWatch recorders (largely individuals with a more specific interest in bumblebees). Within both projects, recorders demonstrated an improvement in identification ability over time. Here we demonstrate and quantify the essential role of expert verification within citizen science projects, and highlight where resources could be strengthened to improve recorder ability.
| S-EPMC6590798 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundDecisions about appropriate treatment at the end of life are common in modern healthcare. Non-treatment decisions (NTDs), comprising both withdrawal and withholding of (potentially) life-prolonging treatment are in principle accepted in Norway. However, in practice they may give rise to significant moral problems for health professionals, patients and next of kin. Here, patient values must be considered. It is relevant to study the moral views and intuitions of the general population on NTDs and special areas of contention such as the role of next of kin in decision-making.MethodsElectronic survey to members of a nationally representative panel of Norwegian adults. Respondents were presented with vignettes describing patients with disorders of consciousness, dementia, and cancer where patient preferences varied. Respondents answered ten questions about the acceptability of non-treatment decision making and the role of next of kin.ResultsWe received 1035 complete responses (response rate 40.7%). A large majority, 88%, supported the right of competent patients to refuse treatment in general. When an NTD was in line with the patient's previously expressed preferences, more respondents tended to find NTDs acceptable. More respondents would accept NTDs for themselves than for the vignette patients. In a scenario with an incompetent patient, clear majorities wanted the views of next of kin to be given some but not decisive weight, and more weight if concordant with the patient's wishes. There were, however, large variations in the respondents' views.ConclusionThis survey of a representative sample of the Norwegian adult population indicates that attitudes to NTDs are often in line with national laws and guidelines. However, the high variance among the respondents and relatively large weight given to next of kin's views, indicate a need for appropriate dialogue among all stakeholders to prevent conflicts and extra burdens. Furthermore, the emphasis given to previously expressed opinions indicates that advance care planning may increase the legitimacy of NTDs and prevent challenging decision-making processes.
| S-EPMC9993678 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Volunteers are increasingly being recruited into citizen science projects to collect observations for scientific studies. An additional goal of these projects is to engage and educate these volunteers. Thus, there are few barriers to participation resulting in volunteer observers with varying ability to complete the project's tasks. To improve the quality of a citizen science project's outcomes it would be useful to account for inter-observer variation, and to assess the rarely tested presumption that participating in a citizen science projects results in volunteers becoming better observers. Here we present a method for indexing observer variability based on the data routinely submitted by observers participating in the citizen science project eBird, a broad-scale monitoring project in which observers collect and submit lists of the bird species observed while birding. Our method for indexing observer variability uses species accumulation curves, lines that describe how the total number of species reported increase with increasing time spent in collecting observations. We find that differences in species accumulation curves among observers equates to higher rates of species accumulation, particularly for harder-to-identify species, and reveals increased species accumulation rates with continued participation. We suggest that these properties of our analysis provide a measure of observer skill, and that the potential to derive post-hoc data-derived measurements of participant ability should be more widely explored by analysts of data from citizen science projects. We see the potential for inferential results from analyses of citizen science data to be improved by accounting for observer skill.
| S-EPMC4599805 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Premise of the studyA species distribution model computed with automatically identified plant observations was developed and evaluated to contribute to future ecological studies.MethodsWe used deep learning techniques to automatically identify opportunistic plant observations made by citizens through a popular mobile application. We compared species distribution modeling of invasive alien plants based on these data to inventories made by experts.ResultsThe trained models have a reasonable predictive effectiveness for some species, but they are biased by the massive presence of cultivated specimens.DiscussionThe method proposed here allows for fine-grained and regular monitoring of some species of interest based on opportunistic observations. More in-depth investigation of the typology of the observations and the sampling bias should help improve the approach in the future.
| S-EPMC5851560 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To assess the ability of traditional biological recording schemes and lay citizen science approaches to gather data on species distributions and changes therein, we examined bumblebee records from the UK's national repository (National Biodiversity Network) and from BeeWatch. The two recording approaches revealed similar relative abundances of bumblebee species but different geographical distributions. For the widespread common carder (Bombus pascuorum), traditional recording scheme data were patchy, both spatially and temporally, reflecting active record centre rather than species distribution. Lay citizen science records displayed more extensive geographic coverage, reflecting human population density, thus offering better opportunities to account for recording effort. For the rapidly spreading tree bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum), both recording approaches revealed similar distributions due to a dedicated mapping project which overcame the patchy nature of naturalist records. We recommend, where possible, complementing skilled naturalist recording with lay citizen science programmes to obtain a nation-wide capability, and stress the need for timely uploading of data to the national repository.
| S-EPMC4623864 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Online citizen science projects such as GalaxyZoo1, Eyewire2 and Phylo3 have proven very successful for data collection, annotation and processing, but for the most part have harnessed human pattern-recognition skills rather than human creativity. An exception is the game EteRNA4, in which game players learn to build new RNA structures by exploring the discrete two-dimensional space of Watson-Crick base pairing possibilities. Building new proteins, however, is a more challenging task to present in a game, as both the representation and evaluation of a protein structure are intrinsically three-dimensional. We posed the challenge of de novo protein design in the online protein-folding game Foldit5. Players were presented with a fully extended peptide chain and challenged to craft a folded protein structure and an amino acid sequence encoding that structure. After many iterations of player design, analysis of the top-scoring solutions and subsequent game improvement, Foldit players can now-starting from an extended polypeptide chain-generate a diversity of protein structures and sequences that encode them in silico. One hundred forty-six Foldit player designs with sequences unrelated to naturally occurring proteins were encoded in synthetic genes; 56 were found to be expressed and soluble in Escherichia coli, and to adopt stable monomeric folded structures in solution. The diversity of these structures is unprecedented in de novo protein design, representing 20 different folds-including a new fold not observed in natural proteins. High-resolution structures were determined for four of the designs, and are nearly identical to the player models. This work makes explicit the considerable implicit knowledge that contributes to success in de novo protein design, and shows that citizen scientists can discover creative new solutions to outstanding scientific challenges such as the protein design problem.
| S-EPMC6701466 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We are currently in the midst of Earth's sixth extinction event, and measuring biodiversity trends in space and time is essential for prioritizing limited resources for conservation. At the same time, the scope of the necessary biodiversity monitoring is overwhelming funding for professional scientific monitoring. In response, scientists are increasingly using citizen science data to monitor biodiversity. But citizen science data are 'noisy', with redundancies and gaps arising from unstructured human behaviours in space and time. We ask whether the information content of these data can be maximized for the express purpose of trend estimation. We develop and execute a novel framework which assigns every citizen science sampling event a marginal value, derived from the importance of an observation to our understanding of overall population trends. We then make this framework predictive, estimating the expected marginal value of future biodiversity observations. We find that past observations are useful in forecasting where high-value observations will occur in the future. Interestingly, we find high value in both 'hotspots', which are frequently sampled locations, and 'coldspots', which are areas far from recent sampling, suggesting that an optimal sampling regime balances 'hotspot' sampling with a spread across the landscape.
| S-EPMC6790778 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Aim: Explicitly addressing clinical reasoning (CR) is seen as a promising opportunity in the teaching of the biomedical sciences to enable students to acquire the skills to meet the challenges posed by ever more complex health care processes. The quality of diagnostic decisions plays an essential role here. Our aim is to examine if biomedical scientists recognize the practical relevance of CR and are able to apply it as a reflective framework for their professional practice.Method: In two different educational settings, biomedical science students were asked to look closely at CR in the context of the degree program and to indentify the different forms of reasoning used in their internships and professional practice. The written descriptions were analyzed for content and discussed in the seminars.Results: In both scenarios, the analyses of the students’ descriptions and discussions showed that examining the different forms of CR helped to raise conscious awareness of thought and decision-making processes, encouraging students to think critically about them and to articulate insights about them, as well as recognize the importance of different reasoning strategies when making specific medical decisions.Conclusion: CR for biomedical scientists could help make decision-making processes visible for other occupational groups and thus advantageously integrate specific professional expertise into health care.Over the long term, an interdisciplinary focus on CR could foster and promote the development of a shared discourse and interprofessional collaboration.
| S-EPMC6905367 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In its invasive range in Australia, the European rabbit threatens the persistence of native flora and fauna and damages agricultural production. Understanding its distribution and ecological niche is critical for developing management plans to reduce populations and avoid further biodiversity and economic losses.We developed an ensemble of species distribution models (SDMs) to determine the geographic range limits and habitat suitability of the rabbit in Australia. We examined the advantage of incorporating data collected by citizens (separately and jointly with expert data) and explored issues of spatial biases in occurrence data by implementing different approaches to generate pseudo-absences. We evaluated the skill of our model using three approaches: cross-validation, out-of-region validation, and evaluation of the covariate response curves according to expert knowledge of rabbit ecology.Combining citizen and expert occurrence data improved model skill based on cross-validation, spatially reproduced important aspects of rabbit ecology, and reduced the need to extrapolate results beyond the studied areas.Our ensemble model projects that rabbits are distributed across approximately two thirds of Australia. Annual maximum temperatures >25°C and annual minimum temperatures >10°C define, respectively, the southern and northern most range limits of its distribution. In the arid and central regions, close access to permanent water (≤~ 0.4 km) and reduced clay soil composition (~20%-50%) were the major factors influencing the probability of occurrence of rabbits. Synthesis and applications. Our results show that citizen science data can play an important role in managing invasive species by providing missing information on occurrences in regions not surveyed by experts because of logistics or financial constraints. The additional sampling effort provided by citizens can improve the capacity of SDMs to capture important elements of a species ecological niche, improving the capacity of statistical models to accurately predict the geographic range of invasive species.
| S-EPMC6802020 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Research benefits increasingly from valuable contributions by citizen scientists. Mostly, participating adults investigate specific species, ecosystems or phenology to address conservation issues, but ecosystem functions supporting ecosystem health are rarely addressed and other demographic groups rarely involved. As part of a project investigating seed predation and dispersal as ecosystem functions along an urban-rural gradient, we tested whether elementary school children can contribute to the project as citizen scientists. Specifically, we compared data estimating vegetation cover, measuring vegetation height and counting seeds from a seed removal experiment, that were collected by children and scientists in schoolyards. Children counted seeds similarly to scientists but under- or overestimated vegetation cover and measured different heights. We conclude that children can be involved as citizen scientists in research projects according to their skill level. However, more sophisticated tasks require specific training to become familiarized with scientific experiments and the development of needed skills and methods.
| S-EPMC4651542 | biostudies-literature