Citizen scientists reliably count endangered Galapagos marine iguanas from drone images.

ABSTRACT: Population surveys are essential for conservation, but are often resource-intensive. Modern technologies, like drones, facilitate data collection but increase the analysis burden. Citizen Science (CS) offers a solution by engaging non-specialists in data analysis. We evaluated CS for monitoring marine iguanas, focusing on volunteers' accuracy in detecting and counting individuals in aerial images. During three phases of our Zooniverse project, over 13,000 volunteers contributed 1,375,201 classifications from 57,838 images; each classified up to 30 times. Using a Gold Standard dataset of expert counts from 4,345 images, we evaluated optimal aggregation methods for CS-inputs. Volunteers achieved 68-94% accuracy in detection, with more false negatives than false positives. The standard 'major

SUBMITTER: Varela-Jaramillo A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12289890 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature