A pygmy grasshopper is a really small grasshopper and despite Australia being home to a number of species, we don’t know much about them.
In fact, the Angled Australian Barkhopper hadn’t been recorded for more than 130 years until a few citizen scientists snapped pictures of the species in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland and uploaded them to iNaturalist.
A European expert in the family identified the tiny creatures — which only measure a centimetre or two from antennae to tail.
It’s just one of countless discoveries made possible because of the global community of citizen scientists dutifully uploading photographs of the plants and critters they find when out and about.
An expanding archive
iNaturalist allows members of the public to snap a picture of a beetle, a leaf, a bit of moss (or anything living really), and upload it to the database where other users can identify it.
Beyond communities of everyday people uploading their sightings, it’s also long been used by biologists around the world and has driven many scientific discoveries.
“With cameras and smartphones now everywhere, just about anyone can use iNaturalist to record living things anywhere in the world,” says Simon Gorta, co-author on the paper and PhD candidate from the UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science.
“Our research shows that the abundance of data this process generates is driving important biodiversity research.”
Until now, much of the value of iNaturalist was only anecdotal — researchers knew it was being used but didn’t know exactly how widely.
Now, for the first time, an international team of researchers, including two from UNSW Sydney, has totted up the numbers to quantify just how important the platform is becoming for biodiversity research.
The team found that use of iNaturalist data in peer-reviewed research has shot up tenfold in the last five years, matching the growing increase in observations uploaded to the platform.
According to the team, that means that the platform should only get more comprehensive and therefore more useful to researchers as more people contribute.
Scientists use iNaturalist not only to identify new species, but also better understand where individual species live (their “ranges”).
The study examined scientific literature that cited iNaturalist data and found that it has been used across 128 countries and 638 groups of different kinds of animals, plants, and other living things that are closely related to each other.
Research topics ranged from conservation planning and habitat modelling to education and machine learning.
Data is also being used to understand the impacts of climate change, conduct ecological and evolutionary analyses, rediscover extinct species, characterise species interactions, and drive biosecurity and weed management.
“Data use is greatly diversifying as the full potential and value of these data are being realised,” says Thomas Mesaglio, co-author on the paper and PhD candidate from the UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Centre.
Also key is the development of new software and tools to analyse the data and extract information.
This all means that millions of people around the world are now shaping research and conservation outcomes for countless species in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago.
“One of the standout features of iNaturalist is that it provides data on certain organisms, regions, or time periods where we just don’t have coverage otherwise through standardised monitoring programs,” says Mr Gorta.
An important resource
Australians are global heavyweights when it comes to uploading plant and animal sightings to the platform since it launched in 2008.
In that time 121,000 observers have lodged around 11.5 million observations across more than 64,000 species.
And that’s just Australia, worldwide the numbers are eye-watering: 262 million observations, 518,000 species recorded by 3.8 million observers.
Thomas Mesaglio says this army of citizen scientists has made thousands of discoveries so far, but the true number is likely higher and will go up as researchers get the chance to sift through sightings.
“Time and money are precious resources which seem to be increasingly dwindling, so what iNaturalist does is massively expand the monitoring network to millions of people around the globe.
“iNaturalist both hugely increases the amount of data that can be collected, but also provides invaluable starting points for the researchers to collect data themselves,” Mesaglio says.
“Need to find a particular species in an enormous search area but have limited time and resources? You can check iNaturalist records as a great springboard to inform your data collection.”
“The tenfold increase in peer-reviewed research using our data demonstrates that community science isn't just a nice addition to traditional research methods; it's becoming essential for understanding our rapidly changing planet,” said Carrie Seltzer, the iNaturalist head of engagement, who was not associated with the study.
“Millions of people are helping scientists track biodiversity in ways that would be impossible through traditional scientific fieldwork alone.”
The study, published in the journal BioScience, was a collaborative effort involving researchers from 15 institutions across the United States, Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, and South Korea.
Contributing institutions include the University of Florida, UNSW Sydney, Meise Botanic Garden, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, the University of Münster, and Changwon National University, among others.
Contact details:
Tom Melville
UNSW Science
0432 912 060
[email protected]
