Journal
BIOLOGICAL CONSERVATION
Volume 254, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.108974
Keywords
Citizen science; community science; COVID-19; Data quality; Data quantity; eBird; Observer behaviour
Funding
- Wolf Creek Foundation
- Leon Levy Foundation
- Packard Foundation
- National Science Foundation [ITR-0427914, DBI-0542868, IIS-0612031, ABI-1356308, CCF-1522054, ICR-1927646]
- 2017-2018 Belmont Forum and BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals, under the BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND program [ICR-1927646]
- Academy of Finland (AKA, Univ. Turku) [326327]
- Swedish Research Council (Formas, SLU) [2018-02440]
- Research Council of Norway (Forskningsradet) [NINA: 295767]
- U.S. National Science Foundation
- Academy of Finland (AKA, Univ. Helsinki) [326338]
- Swedish Research Council (Formas, Lund Univ.) [2018-02441]
- Swedish Research Council [2018-02441] Funding Source: Swedish Research Council
- Formas [2018-02440, 2018-02441] Funding Source: Formas
- Academy of Finland (AKA) [326338, 326338, 326327, 326327] Funding Source: Academy of Finland (AKA)
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The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted natural systems globally and also influenced the quality and quantity of data collection. A study on the volunteer-based bird monitoring project eBird revealed subtle changes in data collection and observer effort during the pandemic, with varying effects across different political units.
The COVID-19 pandemic has likely affected natural systems around the world; the curtailment of human activity has also affected the collection of data needed to identify the indirect effects of this pandemic on natural systems. We describe how the outbreak of COVID-19 disease, and associated stay-at-home orders in four political regions, have affected the quantity and quality of data collected by participants in one volunteer-based bird monitoring project, eBird. The four regions were selected both for their early and prolonged periods of mandated changes to human activity, and because of the high densities of observations collected. We compared the months of April 2020 with April in previous years. The most notable change was in the landscapes in which observations were made: in all but one region human-dominated landscapes were proportionally more common in the data in April 2020, and observations made near the rarer wetland habitat were less prevalent. We also found subtler changes in quantity of data collected, as well as in observer effort within observation periods. Finally, we found that these effects of COVID-19 disease varied across the political units, and thus we conclude that any analyses of eBird data will require region-specific examination of whether there have been any changes to the data collection process during the COVID-19 pandemic that would need to be taken into account.
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