Optimizing future biodiversity sampling by citizen scientists.

ABSTRACT: 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 obser

SUBMITTER: Callaghan CT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6790778 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature