In a changing world, it is essential to understand how species ranges and phenologies are altered in order to plan for future conservation efforts. However, effective insights require high quality, long-term data documenting the abundance and range of taxa under study. Odonates (dragonflies and damselflies) have established themselves as popular study organisms for insect-based climate studies, partly because of tight ties between their life history and environmental conditions, and partly because their charismatic nature has resulted in a large hobbyist following. While scientific records of this taxa may be relatively limited, hobbyist participation in surveying for odonates offers unprecedented coverage over time and space, making dynamic monitoring of phenology and range change more feasible. However, while citizen science databases, like iNaturalist, house thousands of observations for this order, concerns regarding the accuracy and thoroughness of these public endeavors have arisen. Certain anomalies in the public data, most noticeably a large data gap centered around the central Appalachians, suggest that public datasets may be incomplete or biased by human factors, and thus misrepresentative of the ‘true’ presence in that area. But do these observation gaps represent true biodiversity gaps, or do other factors limit the reporting of sightings of odonates?
Results/Conclusions
To examine the accuracy and representativeness of reports of odonates to citizen science databases, we performed an extensive “ground truthing” survey across four states in a north-south transect (OH, WV, KY, and VA) in the 2019 summer season. We recorded 26 species of odonate, in our survey, and a total of 429 individuals were observed, compared to 48 species of odonates, and 510 individuals, recorded near our sites in iNaturalist in 2019. The spatial distribution of observations made during our field surveys were largely consistent with Odonate patterns recorded in citizen science database, showing a noticeable decline in species biodiversity and abundance that aligned with the ‘data gap’ observed from iNaturalist contributions. These findings suggest that citizen science provides realistic reflection of odonate biodiversity for the focal region and supports the use of data of this type in biological investigations. However, these same findings raise further questions regarding potential ecological causes of the observed data gap.