INaturalist and Structured Mammal Surveys Reflect Similar Species Richness but Capture Different Species Pools Across the United States.

ABSTRACT: Crowd-sourced biodiversity data, such as those housed in the iNaturalist platform, are increasingly used to monitor species distributions. Such data represent unstructured biodiversity surveys that are generally comprised of incidental observations and do not report variation in sampling effort. These discrepancies may yield data that is incongruent with data from structured surveys. To assess whether mammalian iNaturalist data are reflective of data from traditional structured surveys, we calculated and compared measures of mammalian species richness and species pool similarity using data from unstructured surveys (i.e., iNaturalist) and data from structured camera trap surveys and bat acoustic surveys. We found that data from structured and unstructured surveys generally document similar

SUBMITTER: Herrera DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12276820 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature