citizen science | ConservationBytes.com

iEcology identifies extent of synthetic polymer habitats

22 01 2025

The internet has become an informational telescope to study what happens nearly everywhere the planet. Using internet observations, it has been recently documented that terrestrial hermit crabs use plastic waste as shelter along tropical coasts.

Before the internet irrupted, I was living in Spain and frequently travelled from my hometown to universities in Valencia and Barcelona to access scientific journals. Back then, these journals were only available in print or on compact discs. Today, I can do the same thing from home with an internet connection.

The emergence of public internet since the 1990s has globalised information and represents a data source for many areas of science (1, 2). When applied to nature, the term iEcology (internet Ecology) refers to the use of online documentation to study the natural history of plants and animals, their distributions, and the effects of humans on them (3). In fact, the internet highlights and promotes certain research topics. For example, bird species that are more frequently mentioned on social networks tend to be described taxonomically earlier, and are also the ones that interact most (positively or negatively) with human activity (4).

In search of the phenomenon

By exploring internet platforms Alamy, Flickr, Google, YouTube, and iNaturalist, Zuzanna Jagiello and her collaborators collected nearly 30 thousand photographs of hermit crabs to study the use of rubbish by these crustaceans (5). Hermit crabs are known for their peculiar habit of using empty snail shells to house their unprotected abdomens, carrying them around like someone travelling with their house on their back (6) — David Attenborough narrates here a funny swapping of shells among crabs of different size. The researchers aimed to assess the extent of the phenomenon of hermit crabs replacing natural shells with artificial materials as mobile homes (see video capturing the scene).

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Tags: hermit crab, plastic pollution, plasticene
Categories : citizen science, marine, ocean, pollution, research, science

Citizens meet coral gardening

12 10 2021

It is possible to cultivate corals in the sea like growing a nursery of trees to restore a burned forest. Cultivated corals grow faster than wild corals and can be outplanted to increase the healthy area of damaged reefs. Incorporated in projects of citizen science and ecotourism, this activity promotes environmental awareness about coral reefs, the marine ecosystem that is both the most biodiverse and the most threatened by global change.

When I finished by undergraduate studies in the 1980s, I met several top Spanish marine biologists to prospect my first job ever in academia. In all one-to-one interviews I had, I was asked what my interests were. And when I described that I wanted to study ways of modifying impacted marine ecosystems to restore their biodiversity, a well-known professor judged that my proposition was an inviable form of jardinería marina (marine gardening) ― those words made me feel embarrassed and have remained vivid in my professional imagination since. Neither the expert nor the young researcher knew at the time that we were actually talking about ecological restoration, a discipline that was being formalised exactly then by botanists in their pledge to recover pre-European conditions for North American grasslands (1).

Aspects of coral gardening. The photos show (top) a diver scraping off (with the aid of a toothbrush) algae, sponges and parasites that compete for light and nutrients with the coral fragments under cultivation along suspended ropes (Cousin Island, Seychelles), (middle) coral outplantings in the Gulf of Eliat (Red Sea) hosting a diverse community of fish that clean off the biofouling for free (21), and (bottom) a donor colony farmed off Onna (Okinawa, Japan) (12). Photos courtesy of Luca Saponari (Cousin), Buki Rinkevich (Eliat) and Yoshimi Higa / Onna Village Fishery Cooperative.

Today, the term coral gardening encompasses the suite of methods to cultivate corals (tiny colonial jellyfish with an external skeleton and a carnivorous diet) and to outplant them into the wild to boost the growth of coral reefs following perturbations (2). In the face of the decline of coral reefs globally, due to the combination of climate change, pollution, and overfishing (3), this type of mariculture has gathered momentum in the last three decades and is currently being applied to more than 100 coral species in all the main reefs of our seas and oceans (4-6).

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Tags: Citizen science, climate change, coral gardening, coral reefs, coral-reef restoration, ecological restoration, Education, marine gardening, outplantings, outreach
Categories : algae, biodiversity, citizen science, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, economics, education, environmental engineering, habitat loss, investment, marine, recovery, restoration, translocation

InvaCost – estimating the economic damage of invasive insects

7 11 2014

This is a blosh (rehash of someone else’s blog post) of Franck Courchamp‘s posts on an exciting new initiative of which I am excited to be a part. Incidentally, Franck’s spending the week here in Adelaide.

Don’t forgot to vote for the project to receive 50 000 € public-communication grant!

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Climate change will make winters milder and habitats climatically more suitable year-round for cold-blooded animals like insects, but there are many questions remaining regarding whether such insects will be able to invade other regions as the climate shifts. There are many nasty bugs out there.

For example, the Asian predatory wasp is an invasive hornet in Europe that butchers pollinating insects, especially bees, thereby affecting the production of many wild and cultivated plants. I hope that we all remember what Einstein said about pollinators:

If bees were to disappear, humans will disappear within a few years.

(we all should remember that because it’s one of the few things he said that most of us understood). The highly invasive red fire ant is feared for its impacts on biodiversity, agriculture and cattle breeding, and the thousands of anaphylactic shocks inflicted to people by painful stings every year (with hundreds of deaths). Between the USA and Australia, over US$10 billion is spent yearly on the control of this insect alone. Tiger mosquitoes are vectors of pathogens that cause dengue fever, chikungunya virus and of about 30 other viruses. We could go on.

Most of these nasty creatures are now unable to colonise northern regions of Europe or America, or southern regions of Australia, for example, because they cannot survive cold temperatures. But how will this change? Where, when and which species will invade with rising temperatures? What will be the costs in terms of species loss? In terms of agricultural or forestry loss? In terms of diseases to cattle, domestic animals and humans? What will be the death toll if insects that are vectors of malaria can establish in new, highly populated areas?

We’ve proposed to study these and others from a list of 20 of the worst invasive insect species worldwide, and we got selected (i.e., financed!) by the Fondation BNP Paribas. In addition, the Fondation BNP Paribas has selected five scientific programmes on climate change and will give 50,000 € (that’s US$62,000) to the one selected by the public, for a communication project on their scientific programme. This is why we need you to vote for our project: InvaCost. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: BNP Paribas, Citizen science, climate change, Economics, Franck Courchamp, Global warming, insects, InvaCost, invasive species
Categories : agriculture, alien species, bioclimatic envelope, cattle, citizen science, climate change, climate shift, conservation, disease, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental economics, Europe, food, health, invasive species, management, research, science, science communication

Ecological processes depend on …

14 05 2014

I have been known to say (ok – I say it all the time) that ecologists should never equivocate when speaking to the public. Whether it’s in a media release, blog post, television presentation or newspaper article, just stick to ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In other words, don’t qualify your answer with some horrid statistical statement (i.e., in 95% of cases …) or say something like “… but it really depends on …”. People don’t understand uncertainty – to most people, ‘uncertainty’ means “I don’t know” or worse, “I made it all up”.

But that’s only in the movies.

In real ‘ecological’ life, things are vastly different. It’s never as straightforward as ‘yes’ or ‘no’, because ecology is complex. There are times that I forget this important aspect when testing a new hypothesis with what seem like unequivocal data, but then reality always hits.

Our latest paper is the epitome of this emergent complexity from what started out as a fairly simple question using some amazing data. What makes birds change their range¹? We looked at this question from a slightly different angle than had been done before because we had access to climate data, life-history data and most importantly, actual range change data. It’s that latter titbit that is typically missing from studies aiming to understand what drives species toward a particular fate; whether it’s a species distribution model predicting the future habitat suitability of some species as a function of climate change, or the past dynamics of some species related to its life history pace, most often the combined dynamics are missing. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: area of occupancy, bird, birds, Britain, ecology, environment, range dynamics, United Kingdom
Categories : biodiversity, biogeography, citizen science, conservation, decline, deforestation, demography, ecology, Europe, extinction, fragmentation, habitat loss, island biogeography, management, modelling, population dynamics, science

Putting the ‘science’ in citizen science

30 04 2014

How to tell if a koala has been in your garden. © Great Koala Count

When I was in Finland last year, I had the pleasure of meeting Tomas Roslin and hearing him describe his Finland-wide citizen-science project on dung beetles. What impressed me most was that it completely flipped my general opinion about citizen science and showed me that the process can be useful.

I’m not trying to sound arrogant or scientifically elitist here – I’m merely stating that it was my opinion that most citizen-science endeavours fail to provide truly novel, useful and rigorous data for scientific hypothesis testing. Well, I must admit that I still believe that ‘most’ citizen-science data meet that description (although there are exceptions – see here for an example), but Tomas’ success showed me just how good they can be.

So what’s the problem with citizen science? Nothing, in principle; in fact, it’s a great idea. Convince keen amateur naturalists over a wide area to observe (as objectively) as possible some ecological phenomenon or function, record the data, and submit it to a scientist to test some brilliant hypothesis. If it works, chances are the data are of much broader coverage and more intensively sampled than could ever be done (or afforded) by a single scientific team alone. So why don’t we do this all the time?

If you’re a scientist, I don’t need to tell you how difficult it is to design a good experimental sampling regime, how even more difficult it is to ensure objectivity and precision when sampling, and the fastidiousness with which the data must be recorded and organised digitally for final analysis. And that’s just for trained scientists! Imagine an army of well-intentioned, but largely inexperienced samplers, you can quickly visualise how the errors might accumulate exponentially in a dataset so that it eventually becomes too unreliable for any real scientific application.

So for these reasons, I’ve been largely reluctant to engage with large-scale citizen-science endeavours. However, I’m proud to say that I have now published my first paper based entirely on citizen science data! Call me a hypocrite (or a slow learner). Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: abundance estimate, Citizen science, citizen scientist, koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, SDM, South Australia, species distribution model
Categories : Australia, biogeography, citizen science, conservation, ecology, fragmentation, mammal, mathematics, modelling, research, South Australia, southern Australia

DNA barcoding plants with citizen science

28 08 2013

I was contacted recently by Oscar Jaslowski of Microryza (a web platform that allows scientists to post research ideas and collect contributions from web visitors) about a project getting underway in Alaska by Ellen Jorgensen of Genspace. He suggested it might make a good post for ConservationBytes.com, and I agreed. Thanks for the contribution, Ellen & Oscar.

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There’s nothing so final as watching the bush pilot take off in his tiny plane, leaving you stranded in the Alaskan backcountry. We had plenty of food for a three-day expedition, but no satellite phone or any other way to contact anyone. In Alaska, the phrase ‘primordial indifference’ pretty much sums up your relationship with the vast, glacier-carved landscape. Mother Nature does not care if an ant like you lives or dies.

Our destination, the Skolai Valley, is located about 480 km (300 miles) east of Anchorage, in the heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. At a whopping 5.3 million hectares (13 million acres), it is the largest national park in the United States, and probably one of the least-visited. Much of its forbidding territory is snow-covered and similar to the Himalayas. In fact, the size of the massive ice fall that towers over the town of McCarthy, the origin of our flight, is exceeded only by one near Mt. Everest. But winding through the glaciers and snowfields are alpine valleys that are a backpacker’s dream. And Genspace, the nonprofit science-based organisation that I direct, was lucky enough to have received funding in 2012 to launch this expedition to Skolai.

Our mission: to barcode wild Alaskan plant life. Two of us headed down into the river valley and the other two climbed up to the level of the mountain pass to survey more alpine vegetation. We were carrying portable plant presses – normally something too bulky for backpacking, but necessary for this trip. Read the rest of this entry »