Abstract

Estimating species distributions requires species presence data of sufficient quantity from reputable sources that are geographically representative of the species’ space use. Collecting presence data that meets these standards can be costly and is often complicated by limited land access. Citizen science projects are an appealing alternative source of presence data as these data are freely available and collected globally. Websites such as eBird have become increasingly large repositories of citizen science data. The vulnerable lesser prairie-chicken (LPC; Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) is a species well-represented in the eBird database, with presence observations from 140 unique locations from 2012 to 2014. During that same period, a distribution-wide, standardized aerial survey with state and federal support recorded 106 LPC detections. Our objective was to compare species distribution models (SDMs) made with eBird data to models made with aerial survey data to determine the potential for citizen science data to contribute to conservation planning. We used maximum entropy modeling to create SDMs based on eBird data, aerial survey data, and a combination of both data sets using variables of biological significance to LPCs. We obtained comparable model performance using aerial survey data only [standardized test omission rate (STO): 23.4%, test AUC: 0.76] and with eBird data only (STO: 23.8%, AUC: 0.76). The I statistic confirmed a very high degree of similarity between the outputs of the two model sets (I = 0.929). However, a road bias existed within both data sets (positive and negative biases), potentially confounding some environmental correlates. Despite this bias, our combined model predicted an increase of 1,732,500 ha of unique area suitable for the LPC. Our results indicated that eBird data could be used as a low-cost source for species occurrence data to create species distribution models, though biases in these datasets should be assessed to guide interpretability of the predicted outputs.

中文翻译：

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使用航测和公民科学来创建针对松鸡的物种分布模型

摘要

估计物种分布需要从信誉良好的来源获得足够数量的物种存在数据，这些数据可在地理上代表物种的空间使用。收集符合这些标准的状态数据可能会很昂贵，并且通常由于土地使用受限而变得复杂。公民科学项目是一种有吸引力的在线状态数据的替代来源，因为这些数据可免费获得并在全球范围内收集。诸如eBird之类的网站已成为越来越大的公民科学数据存储库。弱势的小草原鸡（LPC;鼓耳pallidicinctus）是eBird数据库中代表性很好的一个物种，从2012年到2014年在140个独特位置进行了观测。在同一时期，在州和联邦支持的分布范围内的标准化航空调查中，记录了106次LPC检测。我们的目标是将使用eBird数据制作的物种分布模型（SDM）与通过航空测量数据制作的模型进行比较，以确定公民科学数据有助于保护规划的潜力。我们使用最大熵建模基于eBird数据，航测数据以及使用对LPC具有生物学意义的变量的两个数据集的组合来创建SDM。我们仅使用航测数据[标准测试遗漏率（STO）：23.4％，测试AUC：0.76]和仅使用eBird数据（STO：23.8％，AUC：0.76）获得了可比的模型性能。的我的统计数据证实了两个模型集的输出之间非常相似（I  = 0.929）。但是，这两个数据集中都存在道路偏差（正偏差和负偏差），可能会混淆一些环境相关因素。尽管存在这种偏见，我们的组合模型仍预测适用于LPC的独特面积将增加1,732,500公顷。我们的结果表明，尽管应该评估这些数据集中的偏差以指导预测输出的可解释性，但是eBird数据可以用作建立物种分布模型的低成本来源。