Data-derived metrics describing the behaviour of field-based citizen scientists provide insights for project design and modelling bias.

ABSTRACT: Around the world volunteers and non-professionals collect data as part of environmental citizen science projects, collecting wildlife observations, measures of water quality and much more. However, where projects allow flexibility in how, where, and when data are collected there will be variation in the behaviour of participants which results in biases in the datasets collected. We develop a method to quantify this behavioural variation, describing the key drivers and providing a tool to account for biases in models that use these data. We used a suite of metrics to describe the temporal and spatial behaviour of participants, as well as variation in the data they collected. These were applied to 5,268 users of the iRecord Butterflies mobile phone app, a multi-species environmental citizen

SUBMITTER: August T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7334204 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature