Six years ago, the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) began an effort to track down Utah’s flashing fireflies using the power of community science. Up until 2013, only about 10 flashing firefly populations had been identified in Utah. Most of the identified populations lacked specific data such as locality information beyond the nearest city. Flashing fireflies in Utah are relatively scarce and hard to locate during the few weeks that they flash, so documenting their occurrence has eluded professional and academic entomologists. The NHMU and faculty at Brigham Young University recognized the need to broaden the scope of sampling beyond what could be accomplished by teams of entomologists. The resulting concerted, three-pronged approach to community science included advertising, publicity, and extensive outreach. Community science efforts resulted in 192 confirmed sightings of flashing fireflies for which GPS coordinates were recorded. We evaluated habitats of occurrence by considering 9 habitat criteria from publicly available GIS data: existing vegetation type, canopy cover, and height; wetlands; water-related land use; distance to perennial or intermittent streams; distance to major roads; distance to cities; and elevation.
Results/Conclusions
Nineteen percent of the observed firefly locations (37 points) occurred in wetlands mapped by the National Wetlands Inventory; of those, 78% (29 points) were in emergent meadows, as expected. The remainder of the recorded locations (155 points) did not occur in mapped wetlands. Most of the data showed strong correlations with roads, cities, and developed areas. For example, median distance from firefly locations to cities was 64 m, while the median distance to cities from points on a 30-m statewide grid was just over 24 km. It seems likely that firefly observations reflect observer bias, in which observations occurred disproportionately close to roads, cities, and in developed landscapes. However, it may also be that real correlations exist between Utah’s fireflies and developed areas. Disentangling actual habitat occurrence by fireflies from observer bias is a challenge requiring further systematic investigation. The potential for observer bias is a non-trivial issue in community science endeavors like ours, in which crowd-sourced data collection occurs non-systematically by untrained observers going about their normal lives. At the same time, coverage by many people is probably necessary for collecting some kinds of data such as those for Utah’s flashing fireflies. Our project highlights some of the limits, needs, and possibilities for integrating research with broad-scale community science.