Abstract

Understanding species richness patterns in time and space is critical for conservation management and ecological analyses. But estimates of species richness for a given place are often imprecise and incomplete, even when derived from expert-validated range maps. The current uptake of citizen science in natural resource management, conservation, and ecology offers great potential for extensive data to define species occurrence and richness patterns in the future. Yet, studies are needed to validate these richness patterns and ensure these data are fit-for-purpose. We compared data from a continental-scale citizen science project—FrogID—with expert-derived range maps to assess how well the former predicts species richness patterns in space. We then investigated how many citizen science submissions are necessary to fully sample the underlying frog community. There was a strong positive association between citizen science species richness estimates and estimates derived from an expert-derived map of frog distributions. An average of 153 citizen science submissions were necessary to fully-sample frog richness based on the expert-derived frog richness. Sampling effort in the citizen science project was negatively correlated with the remoteness of an area: less remote areas were more likely to have a greater number of citizen science submissions and be fully sampled. This suggests that scientists will likely need to rely on professionals for data collection in remote regions. We conclude that a citizen science project that has been running for ~ 18 months, can accurately predict frog species richness at a continental scale compared with an expert-derived map based on ~ 240 years of data accumulation. At large-scales, biodiversity data derived from citizen science projects will likely play a prominent role in the future of biodiversity and conservation.

中文翻译：

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满足采样阈值时，公民科学数据可以准确地预测大陆范围内专家衍生的物种丰富度

摘要

了解时间和空间上物种的丰富度模式对于保护管理和生态分析至关重要。但是，即使从专家验证的范围图中得出，对给定地点物种丰富度的估算也往往不准确且不完整。当前公民科学在自然资源管理，保护和生态方面的应用为在将来定义物种的发生和丰富度模式的大量数据提供了巨大的潜力。然而，需要进行研究以验证这些丰富度模式并确保这些数据适合目的。我们将来自大陆规模的公民科学项目FrogID的数据与专家得出的范围图进行了比较，以评估前者对空间物种丰富度模式的预测情况。然后，我们调查了多少样本公民科学提交物才能充分采样基础的青蛙群落。公民科学物​​种丰富度估计值与专家得出的青蛙分布图得出的估计值之间存在很强的正相关关系。根据专家得出的青蛙丰富度，平均需要153份公民科学论文才能完全采样青蛙丰富度。公民科学项目中的抽样工作与某个地区的偏远程度呈负相关：偏远地区越少，公民科学论文的提交就越可能被充分采样。这表明科学家很可能需要依靠专业人员在偏远地区收集数据。我们得出的结论是，一个已经运行了大约18个月的公民科学项目，与基于约240年数据积累的专家得出的地图相比，它可以在大陆范围内准确预测青蛙物种的丰富度。大规模地，从公民科学项目获得的生物多样性数据将可能在未来的生物多样性和保护中发挥重要作用。