Can Observation Skills of Citizen Scientists Be Estimated Using Species Accumulation Curves?

ABSTRACT: 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 wh

SUBMITTER: Kelling S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4599805 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature