COVID-19 impacts on participation in large scale biodiversity-themed community science projects in the United States.

ABSTRACT: Shutdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have had extensive impacts on professional and volunteer-based biodiversity and conservation efforts. We evaluated the impact of the widespread pandemic-related closures in the spring of 2020 on participation patterns and rates on a national and a state-by-state basis in the United States in four biodiversity-themed community science programs: eBird, eButterfly, iNaturalist, and Nature's Notebook. We compared the number of participants, observations submitted, and proportion of observations collected in urban environments in spring 2020 to the expected values for these metrics based on activity in the previous five years (2015-2019), which in many cases exhibited underlying growth. At the national scale, eButterfly and Nature's Note

SUBMITTER: Crimmins TM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9746923 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature