Differential reporting of biodiversity in two citizen science platforms during COVID-19 lockdown in Colombia.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the potential of using data from long-term citizen science projects to answer questions about the impacts of unexpected events on biodiversity. We evaluate the suitability of data from the citizen science platforms iNaturalist and eBird to describe the effects of the "anthropause" on biodiversity observation in Colombia. We compared record distribution according to human footprint, sampling behaviors, overall and conservation priority species composition during the strictest phase of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 to the same periods in 2015-2019. Overall participation in both platforms during the lockdown was high when compared to previous years, but records were concentrated on highly-transformed regions, had lower sampling efforts, and fewer species were

SUBMITTER: Sanchez-Clavijo LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9186113 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature