| Popis: |
Citizen science programmes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular among those with an interest in natural history, but remain the domain of a relatively small portion of the public and heavily biased toward certain areas. Although systematic recording of biodiversity data has been practiced for centuries in the Global North, many tropical nations are still vastly under-surveyed. Yet with the explosive popularity of social media, and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphone cameras, millions of people are posting photographs on social media daily. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these data to enhance our biodiversity understanding using Bangladesh, a megadiverse South Asian nation, as a case study. We compared biodiversity records extracted from Facebook with those from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) collating geospatial records for 1,013 unique species, including 970 species from Facebook (representing 25% of observation records) and 712 species in GBIF (representing 75% of observation records). While a vast proportion of the combined spatial data were biased towards major cities, Facebook records were more evenly spatially distributed compared to those from GBIF. About 86% of the available distribution records on threatened species were from Facebook, whereas GBIF records were almost entirely of Least Concern species. Our results reveal that social media archives can contain biodiversity data that far eclipses that available from formal databases in terms of volume, and also complements formal data both taxonomically and spatially. A key research priority now is the development of mechanisms for extracting and interpreting social media biodiversity data. |
