Citizen science and online data: Opportunities and challenges for snake ecology and action against snakebite.

ABSTRACT: The secretive behavior and life history of snakes makes studying their biology, distribution, and the epidemiology of venomous snakebite challenging. One of the most useful, most versatile, and easiest to collect types of biological data are photographs, particularly those that are connected with geographic location and date-time metadata. Photos verify occurrence records, provide data on phenotypes and ecology, and are often used to illustrate new species descriptions, field guides and identification keys, as well as in training humans and computer vision algorithms to identify snakes. We scoured eleven online and two offline sources of snake photos in an attempt to collect as many photos of as many snake species as possible, and attempt to explain some of the inter-species variation in p

SUBMITTER: Durso AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8264216 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature