TY - JOUR
T1 - Using open access observational data for conservation action
T2 - A case study for birds
AU - Sullivan, Brian L.
AU - Phillips, Tina
AU - Dayer, Ashley A.
AU - Wood, Christopher L.
AU - Farnsworth, Andrew
AU - Iliff, Marshall J.
AU - Davies, Ian J.
AU - Wiggins, Andrea
AU - Fink, Daniel
AU - Hochachka, Wesley M.
AU - Rodewald, Amanda D.
AU - Rosenberg, Kenneth V.
AU - Bonney, Rick
AU - Kelling, Steve
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank all participants in eBird's data use surveys, especially those who took the time to provide detailed accounts of their projects in the data use exemplars section of this paper (names cannot be provided because the survey was ?confidential? ? IRB Protocol ID # 1504005511). Thanks also to the thousands of eBird participants around the world who serve as the engine for the eBird enterprise, and the hundreds of regional editors who volunteer their time to review incoming data. We thank our international partners. John Fitzpatrick, Hugh Possingham, and Nick Salafsky provided insight and helpful discussions on the manuscript. We thank Jeff Gerbracht, Tim Lenz, Will Morris, Tom Fredericks, Kevin Webb, David Huffman, Dan Serpiello, and Tim Levatich for their technical work on the project. Multiple facets of this work have been supported by the following National Science Foundation awards: NSF-ISE:0087760, NSF-DBI:1356308. We thank the Wolf Creek Charitable Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation for continued support. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our supporters.
PY - 2017/4/1
Y1 - 2017/4/1
N2 - Ensuring that conservation decisions are informed by the best available data is a fundamental challenge in the face of rapid global environmental change. Too often, new science is not easily or quickly translated into conservation action. Traditional approaches to data collection and science delivery may be both inefficient and insufficient, as conservation practitioners need access to salient, credible, and legitimate data to take action. Open access data could serve as a tool to help bridge the gap between science and action, by providing conservation practitioners with access to relevant data in near real time. Broad-scale citizen-science data represent a fast-growing resource for open access databases, providing relevant and appropriately scaled data on organisms, much in the way autonomous sensors do so on the environment. Several such datasets are now broadly available, yet documentation of their application to conservation is rare. Here we use eBird, a project where individuals around the world submit data on bird distribution and abundance, as an example of how citizen-science data can be used to achieve tangible conservation science and action at local, regional, and global scales. Our examination illustrates how these data can be strategically applied to improve our understanding of spatial and temporal distributions of birds, the impacts of anthropogenic change on ecological systems, and creative conservation solutions to complex problems. We raise awareness of the types of conservation action now happening with citizen-science data, and discuss the benefits, limitations, and caveats of this approach.
AB - Ensuring that conservation decisions are informed by the best available data is a fundamental challenge in the face of rapid global environmental change. Too often, new science is not easily or quickly translated into conservation action. Traditional approaches to data collection and science delivery may be both inefficient and insufficient, as conservation practitioners need access to salient, credible, and legitimate data to take action. Open access data could serve as a tool to help bridge the gap between science and action, by providing conservation practitioners with access to relevant data in near real time. Broad-scale citizen-science data represent a fast-growing resource for open access databases, providing relevant and appropriately scaled data on organisms, much in the way autonomous sensors do so on the environment. Several such datasets are now broadly available, yet documentation of their application to conservation is rare. Here we use eBird, a project where individuals around the world submit data on bird distribution and abundance, as an example of how citizen-science data can be used to achieve tangible conservation science and action at local, regional, and global scales. Our examination illustrates how these data can be strategically applied to improve our understanding of spatial and temporal distributions of birds, the impacts of anthropogenic change on ecological systems, and creative conservation solutions to complex problems. We raise awareness of the types of conservation action now happening with citizen-science data, and discuss the benefits, limitations, and caveats of this approach.
KW - Citizen-science
KW - Conservation action
KW - Conservation impacts
KW - Conservation outcomes
KW - Data use
KW - eBird
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84969245562&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84969245562&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.biocon.2016.04.031
DO - 10.1016/j.biocon.2016.04.031
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84969245562
VL - 208
SP - 5
EP - 14
JO - Biological Conservation
JF - Biological Conservation
SN - 0006-3207
ER -