Citizen science efforts like iNaturalist that crowdsource identifications of living things have become the fastest growing contributors of biodiversity occurrence data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. But how do identifications contributed by 'the crowd' compare with identifications contributed by professional taxonomic experts? We seek to answer this question by conducting the Identification Quality Experiment described here. In brief:

A. We seek to recruit professional taxonomic experts who will agree to participate in the study by sharing the scope of their taxonomic expertise with us by this form.

B. We will then direct participants to a set of observations within the scope of their expertise (e.g. Butterflies of California) to identify. These identifications will be made while 'blind' meaning that all opinions from the crowd are hidden on the observations. However, the identifications will be shared with the observers and larger iNaturalist community.

C. Once we have enough identifications from participating taxonomic experts (please provide at least 100 identifications), we will conduct an analysis of the accuracy of 'the crowd'. We will then explore whether we can predict accuracy based on observation characteristics (e.g. the species and location, taxonomic rank) and the make up of identifiers from the crowd (e.g. an 'earned reputation' derived from other behavior on the site).

Follow-Up

• Blog post (April 5th, 2017)
• Blog post (May 9th, 2017)

Revised on 10 de julio de 2017 a las 03:05 PM by bouteloua