India’s citizen science movement needs backup

[Aaditeshwar Seth]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-026-00033-9

Thanks for the pointer, Prabhakar! IBP and Season Watch are featured. Will be great if somebody can explain the process on how eBird and other data is validated, how is it pushed to GBIF, frequency of update, etc.? 

Adi

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Aaditeshwar Seth
Microsoft Chair Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi

Co-founder, Gram Vaani; Co-founder, CoRE Stack

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[Suhel Quader]

Thanks for this Aadi. The GBIF stats in the article appear to be for vascular plants, for which

India has contributed only about 240,000 reliably georeferenced, non-cultivated vascular plant records to GBIF — less than 0.1% of the global total of 338.9 million

For this taxon, most of the records from India come from the citizen science project iNaturalist (there are also some 3x more records from non-citizen-science publishers).

The situation with birds is a little better. India's contribution to GBIF is c.60 million records, which is 2.6% of the global total of 2.3 billion records. Some 98.7% of these 60 million records come from eBird. Bird Count India manages the implementation of eBird in India, including data quality.

Unlike in iNaturalist and the India Biodiversity Portal, eBird does not require photos or other media to accompany each report. Many bird species are readily identifiable (by sight or sound) and there is a reasonable understanding of what species are expected where and at what time of the year.

Briefly: the eBird data quality mechanism works through a set of 'filters', which define what species are expected in a given area (could be a district, could be a habitat-based polygon) at a given time of year. There are some 200 filters covering all of India. If a record is expected (as defined by the relevant filter), it is made public immediately. If it is unexpected, then the record is flagged for manual review by regional editors, of which there are over 200 across India. An editor will look at the record and any accompanying information (notes, photo, audio etc) and might correspond with the observer before making a determination about whether the record can be made public based on the strength of evidence that accompanies it. Filters are updated as knowledge of the distribution and seasonality of species improves.

As of end Jan 2026, there are c.77 million observations in eBird from India (you can see a map and more stats here), of which around 0.6% are awaiting review. In 2025, c.14 million observations were contributed (this is a bit of an estimate, I don't have the exact number at the moment).

eBird data are free to download for research, education and conservation. More here.

Cheers,

Suhel

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