Article on Canadian butterfly research and the potential benefits of citizen science

This Globe & Mail article from earlier this week profiles the work of the eButterfly team, and looks at the positive impact that citizen science (CS) has when there is high quality data. Many other research pieces focus on the quality of CS data, but the underlying research paper looks at the applicability of CS to see whether 'opportunistic' observations are novel or confirmatory relative to an existing professional dataset of specimen records. One example from the paper is that CS records added to geographic distribution information for over 80% of the species.

Some of you may be aware of the history, but the eButterfly developers worked closely with several representatives of the Toronto Entomologists' Association on the launch and early use of eButterfly. The TEA incorporates data from eButterfly (as well as iNaturalist and BAMONA) into the Ontario Butterfly Atlas on a regular basis.

Posted on October 13, 2018 01:23 PM by dkaposi