Journal
BIOLOGICAL INVASIONS
Volume 12, Issue 10, Pages 3419-3428Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10530-010-9740-9
Keywords
Citizen science; Shared databases; Data management; Data quality; Invasive species; Non-native species
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [OCI-0636213]
- USDA-NRI [2008-35320-18680]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Limited resources make it difficult to effectively document, monitor, and control invasive species across large areas, resulting in large gaps in our knowledge of current and future invasion patterns. We surveyed 128 citizen science program coordinators and interviewed 15 of them to evaluate their potential role in filling these gaps. Many programs collect data on invasive species and are willing to contribute these data to public databases. Although resources for education and monitoring are readily available, groups generally lack tools to manage and analyze data. Potential users of these data also retain concerns over data quality. We discuss how to address these concerns about citizen scientist data and programs while preserving the advantages they afford. A unified yet flexible national citizen science program aimed at tracking invasive species location, abundance, and control efforts could be designed using centralized data sharing and management tools. Such a system could meet the needs of multiple stakeholders while allowing efficiencies of scale, greater standardization of methods, and improved data quality testing and sharing. Finally, we present a prototype for such a system (see www.citsci.org).
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available