Mapping Life – Quality Assessment of Novice vs. Expert Georeferencers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.30Keywords:
Benchmarking, biodiversity specimens, georeferencing, natural history collections, quality assessment, volunteered geographic informationAbstract
The majority of the world’s billions of biodiversity specimens are tucked away in museum cabinets with only minimal, if any, digital records of the information they contain. Global efforts to digitize specimens are underway, yet the scale of the task is daunting. Fortunately, many activities associated with digitization do not require extensive training and could benefit from the involvement of citizen science participants. However, the quality of the data generated in this way is not well understood. With two experiments presented here, we examine the efficacy of citizen science participants in georeferencing specimen collection localities. In the absence of an online citizen science georeferencing platform and community, students served as a proxy for the larger citizen science population. At Tulane University and Florida State University, undergraduate students and experts used the GEOLocate platform to georeference fish and plant specimen localities, respectively. Our results provide a first-approximation of what can be expected from citizen science participants with minimal georeferencing training as a benchmark for future innovations. After outliers were removed, the range between student and expert georeferenced points was <1.0 to ca. 40.0 km for both the fish and the plant experiments, with an overall mean of 8.3 km and 4.4 km, respectively. Engaging students in the process improved results beyond GEOLocate’s algorithm alone. Calculation of a median point from replicate points improved results further, as did recognition of good georeferencers (e.g., creation of median points contributed by the best 50% of contributors). We provide recommendations for improving accuracy further. We call for the creation of an online citizen science georeferencing platform.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms. If a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s):
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.
Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).