Earning “Honors” credit for Ecology

Earning Honors credits in this class requires you to engage with one of several “Community science” programs, in which members of the community contribute scientific observations for use by researchers.

Two major platforms for community science are iNaturalist ( https://www.inaturalist.org/), to which users can contribute photographs of any organism they observe, and eBird ( https://ebird.org/), to which users can contribute lists of bird species (and associated counts) that they observe.

Information on how to use and contribute to these data is available here:

1. iNaturalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXm3poNkn6Y
2. EBird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t-0xAjxakw

To earn Honors in this course, students are required to engage with one of these two platforms in two ways:

1. Contribute data for future use. If you choose to contribute to iNaturalist, I expect you to contribute at least 20 observations; if you choose to contribute to eBird, you are required to contribute at least 5 checklists. To qualify, each iNaturalist observation should include a picture and ideally a research-grade identification (i.e. a second iNaturalist user verifies species identity), or if you choose to work with eBird, each checklist needs to span at least 20 minutes.

2. Write a ~ 1.5-page paper report (see below) of a scientific publication that uses these data. A list of scientific publications using data from iNaturalist is available here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/published-papers-that-use-inaturalist-data-wiki-4-2024-2025/47837. A list of publications using data from eBird is available here: https://science.ebird.org/en/research-and-conservation/publications

3. In the final week of the semester, I will request you to share with me a compilation of the observations you have contributed to iNaturalist or eBird, as well as your ~1.5-page paper report.

Instructions for paper report

To complete this report, you will first need to select and read one paper that makes use of community science data (see links above for lists of publications using iNaturalist or eBird data). Your paper report should include the following sections:

(i) Objective of the study – what was the main research question, and why is this an important question?

(ii) Methods/approach – how did the authors make use of community science-derived data to address the questions? What were the main statistical approaches they had to use?

(iii) Results and takeaways – what did the authors find, and how does this help address the big question identified in section (i)?

(iv) Personal takeaways – what are some experiences you had while contributing to community science data? Do you think this is an efficient way to collect scientific information? What do we gain by relying on these datasets, and what might we lose?