Science and conservation relies on accurate and timely data to address changes in species populations at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Typically scientific work is slow and unresponsive to short term disturbance. Crowd-sourced data and citizen-science combined with cloud computing and big data have allowed us to overcome many data gathering issues for rare species and in remote locations or for large spatial areas. Meanwhile, citizen-science and crowd sourcing has introduced aspects of human behavior into the data collection. Standardizing collection methodologies cannot resolve many of these issues but they should be taken into account when looking at the data.
This work investigates patterns of data collection in eBird (citizen-science) and through the bird-banding laboratory (expert, crowd-sourced). I investigate spatial and temporal patterns of bird observation at the national scale in The Bahamas, on the island of Grand Bahama in the Bahamas and across the Caribbean. The data shows disparity and bias in who generates the knowledge about bird diversity, when and where that knowledge is created.
I investigate whether data collection is increasing among resident observers; whether data collection is resilient to stochastic events including hurricanes, earthquakes and academic meetings and how these events may affect long term trends in data collection and thereby the biodiversity record.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary data shows that local and regional catastrophic events such as tropical storms may reduce short-term effort as resident observers and communities recover from the impacts and tourism or foreign visitation is reduced. Later, these events may catalyze increases in bird watching activity as the island or region receives philanthropic visitation or increased publicity. Interestingly academic meetings create short-term boosts in bird recording activity at local and national scales or introduce novel observers who may in turn provide novel expertise and add to the species list at multiple scales.
Local biodiversity records in the Caribbean continue to rely on seasonal effort by non-resident observers. Hosting academic meetings on biodiversity that involve local residents and students could improve our knowledge of native biodiversity and seasonal migrants at multiple scales. In turn, this could improve sustainability of monitoring, management and conservation efforts throughout the Caribbean Region.