Citizen science projects provide opportunities for public outreach but often lack the necessary study design to produce data with sufficient validity and statistical power. Species distribution projects often rely on participants with strong identification skills, limiting the participant pool. An alternative is to use decision trees which have coarse taxonomic resolution and data that are prone to false positives and negatives.We sought to examine if our photography-based citizen science project, Shutterbee, could accurately record bee diversity without the pitfalls of other methodologies. We trained participants to take photos of bees in their yard at least twice monthly following a standardized protocol. Participants posted their photos on iNaturalist to be identified. To examine the quality of Shutterbee data, we conducted a single observation period in 75 participants yard’s following the protocol and paired it with the participant’s survey. We also netted in their yards to evaluate the effectiveness of photographic surveys for accurately capturing the bee community. PCAs were used to examine the data quality of individual participants and of photo surveys overall. We aim to discern which participants yielded higher quality data to be utilized in future ecological studies.
Results/Conclusions
Participants varied in their ability to capture the bee diversity in their yard. The variance explained by PC1 allowed us to sort participants. There were no inherent breaks, therefore the cutoff point for including a given participant’s data will be based on the research question. Arbitrarily, we included participants who completed at least five surveys and had an PC1 value of less than 0.85. This resulted in 8,319 observations in 62 yards cataloging 65 taxonomic units (usually genus, but sometimes tribe, subgenus or species). This far outpaces the output of traditional collecting methods. Netting and photography overall captured similar levels of diversity, however netting resulted in higher abundances of small bees. This is most likely because of the ease of catching multiple bees in one sweep as compared to taking photos. These results indicate that in some instances utilizing photography and engaging citizen scientists in the data collection process to record bee diversity can be employed to great success. Although data quality assessments of participants must be done, photographs eliminate false positives and the need for rigorous training on bee identification.
