eBird equivalent for non-avian life forms?

[Jim M.]

eBird, of course, only covers birds.  I'm wondering if others are aware of sites like eBird for reporting other life forms?  These could either be sites dedicated to a particular type of life form, e.g. butterflies, or one that compiles observations of life forms from several orders and phyla. 

I know a dutch site, observado.org, quite similar to eBird, does permit submission of reports of most life forms on a global basis.  It's not as user-friendly as eBird though, and some of the site is in dutch, so I don't expect it to supplant eBird or anything.  But it is interesting as a demonstration that a site for reporting most largeish life forms on a global basis is feasible.

MBP is great and a little like eBird for all Maryland life forms, but of course it is mostly limited, as I understand it, to compiling first county photo records.  (Perhaps it will evolve into something more eBird-like in the future?) 

Jim Moore
Rockville

[Bill Hubick]

Hi Jim,

Yes, there are several national-level sites that aim to cast the widest possible net of citizen science and "crowd source" IDs. They offer the ability to track your lists, add photos, and so on. Two of the more popular tools are iNaturalist and Project Noah. We'd be very interested in your experience with them should you choose to try them out.

As you noted, MBP does not provide the ability to add records and maintain your lists. There are two main reasons that I'd be happy to discuss. The first is simply a question of resources and priorities. Jim Brighton and I created the site from scratch just over a year ago, both while maintaining day jobs, and me showing off my ability to never sleep with an infant at home. So, while we would love to add more list-keeping functionality, it's just wayyy down on our long to-do list. We definitely consider our scope much more than "compiling first county photo records"!  We'd go with something more like "centralizing what we know about all life forms in Maryland"!  :)  Tracking county records allows us to start to flesh out what we know of species' distributions. Just like Least Bittern isn't expected in Garrett, what can we learn of the distribution of various beetles, sedges, and fungi?  But we don't just capture single county firsts, we're also ingesting large data-sets for posterity. For example, we just ingested 1,350 lichen records from various published sources. In June we captured 2,000 moss records, and we care about more than just county firsts. There's just so much useful data out there, but not centrally located or easily accessible. But it's true that we do not offer the list-keeping functionality.

The other major challenge we see with large-scale efforts to capture eBird-like reports is data quality. As you know eBird review is multi-tiered and harnesses hundreds of volunteers in the review process. When it comes to ID of bees, beetles, leafhoppers, grasses, and so on, there are so few people qualified to ID a sighting from a photo - if it's even possible at all based on photo quality. For some groups, we're talking just a handful of people anywhere qualified to verify. That's what makes BugGuide so incredible, in my opinion - they have attracted many experts to volunteer their time verifying challenging IDs. But even then, not only do they not have the resources to also provide the list-keeping functionality, they actually don't maintain all records. If you confirm a Striped Lynx spider and its the only record for the Eastern Shore of Maryland, that is not enough for them to keep it indefinitely. If they determine the photo isn't useful in the gallery, it is eventually discarded ("frassed", as they call it). It's a question of data-storage, and you can read pages and pages of discussion on BugGuide of why its not feasible for them. I tried to plead our case recently in favor of keeping the confirmed records, even without photos, but it didn't change the tide. Now if you expand the scope to all living things in North America, just maintaining the taxonomy of everything is a huge task, and it's hard to speculate how challenging it would be to ensure data-quality. So I'm sure they're collecting lots of good data, but we think our local focus is more powerful. If anyone can line up the funding to go full-time, we'd be happy to add list-keeping features and everything else you can imagine! :)

Perhaps this is a longer answer than you had expected, but hopefully it was of interest. If you check out iNaturalist, Project Noah, or other tools, we'd be very interested in your thoughts.

Regards,

b

 

Bill Hubick

Pasadena, Maryland

bill_...@yahoo.com

http://www.billhubick.com
http://www.marylandbiodiversity.com
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[Tim. Reichard]

Here are some sites that I find useful for animal ID, sighting contribution, and personal sighting stats. 

Birds:

eBird http://ebird.org/content/ebird/


Mammals, Reptiles, Amphibians:

Are there any?


Butterflies and Moths:

http://ebutterfly.ca/ - Like an "eBird for butterflies." Butterflies only, though they may eventually expand to moths.  Accumulates sighting records. Tracks/displays personal stats.  Shows range maps of submitted sightings. They are set up to provide IDs for unknown photographed species, but in practice they rarely check mine.  They might be understaffed for IDs and still building a reviewer network, since they expanded from Canada to the US early this year.

BAMONA http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ - Butterflies and moths.  Excellent and timely with providing IDs.  Accumulates sighting records. No personal stats.  Shows range maps of submitted sightings.  In my experience, the regional butterfly reviewers usually provide an ID in 1-3 weeks and the moth reviewer usually even sooner, often in 1-2 days.  Provides rather incomplete county-level moth checklists with the upside that it's easy to submit first county records for lots of species.  On the other hand, the county butterfly checklists are likely complete.  A downside is the one-sighting-at-a-time submission form, though one of their developers told me that they are working on a solution for bulk sighting entry.

In practice, I use eButterfly for tracking personal sighting stats and BAMONA for IDs.


Dragonflies and Damselflies:

http://www.odonatacentral.org/ - Shows range maps of submitted sightings and checks species ID of submitted photo sightings. Shows complete county checklists and accumulates sightings. Provides an online field guide.


Insects and spiders:

http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740 - BugGuide has a useful and extensive photo guide and provides crowd-sourced IDs, some from experts in their subset of arthropods.  Usually accumulates a state photo record for each species but doesn't accumulate records more generally.


All living things:

http://www.inaturalist.org/ - This site is a good resource for crowd-sourced IDs, tracking personal life lists and sightings, and it accumulates sightings.  It has a basic phone app for snapping a picture and submitting a sighting from it.  Sightings are classified taxonomically and regionally, making it easy to search for taxa at any level from a county, state, or county (e.g., skippers in Maryland or subfamiliy Noctuinae in Calvert County).  Your sightings don't have to have a photo, and you can submit audio observations. You can import photos in bulk from your computer or online photo services like Flickr or Picasa, and location, date, and ID info can be automatically gleaned from photo tags.

http://www.projectnoah.org/ - This site can provide crowd-source IDs and it accumulates sightings.  The sightings are only very simplistically classified and not in much of a taxonomic tree, so while you can search for all insects in North America, you can't search for all beetles in Maryland or all skippers in Howard County. After trying out this site, I found iNaturalist much more useful.

Both of these two sites allow users to add their sightings to focused "projects" (called "missions" in Project Noah) or to start their own.  Sightings can then be downloaded in bulk for a project.