A novel curation system to facilitate data integration across regional citizen science survey programs.

Dana L Campbell,Anne E Thessen,Leslie Ries

doi:10.7717/peerj.9219

Dana L Campbell, Anne E Thessen + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9219

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Abstract

Integrative modeling methods can now enable macrosystem-level understandings of biodiversity patterns, such as range changes resulting from shifts in climate or land use, by aggregating species-level data across multiple monitoring sources. This requires ensuring that taxon interpretations match up across different sources. While encouraging checklist standardization is certainly an option, coercing programs to change species lists they have used consistently for decades is rarely successful. Here we demonstrate a novel approach for tracking equivalent names and concepts, applied to a network of 10 regional programs that use the same protocols (so-called “Pollard walks”) to monitor butterflies across America north of Mexico. Our system involves, for each monitoring program, associating the taxonomic authority (in this case one of three North American butterfly fauna treatments: Pelham, 2014; North American Butterfly Association, Inc., 2016; Opler & Warren, 2003) that shares the most similar overall taxonomic interpretation to the program’s working species list. This allows us to define each term on each program’s list in the context of the appropriate authority’s species concept and curate the term alongside its authoritative concept. We then aligned the names representing equivalent taxonomic concepts among the three authorities. These stepping stones allow us to bridge a species concept from one program’s species list to the name of the equivalent in any other program, through the intermediary scaffolding of aligned authoritative taxon concepts. Using a software tool we developed to access our curation system, a user can link equivalent species concepts between data collecting agencies with no specialized knowledge of taxonomic complexities.

Highlights

There is a long history of piecing together multiple data sets to understand species distributions and patterns at large spatial and temporal extents, including the building of traditional range maps, range changes predicted by niche models (Graham et al, 2004) and the emerging field of macrosystems ecology that focuses on cross-scale dynamicsHow to cite this article Campbell DL, Thessen AE, Ries L. 2020
We present a curation-based solution for associating comparable taxonomic identities in the context of citizen science-powered monitoring, exemplified by North American butterfly monitoring programs
Development of a novel name curation system To evaluate the usefulness of our system, we show how it works in PollardBase and provide a proof-of-concept that the system can be used to automate the integration of data

Summary

INTRODUCTION

There is a long history of piecing together multiple data sets to understand species distributions and patterns at large spatial and temporal extents, including the building of traditional range maps, range changes predicted by niche models (Graham et al, 2004) and the emerging field of macrosystems ecology that focuses on cross-scale dynamics. As large-scale analyses of both pattern and processes are becoming more common, especially through the emergence of the field of macrosystems ecology (Heffernan et al, 2014) and the advancement of integrated statistical models (Zipkin & Saunders, 2018), the need to make data interoperable without requiring each end-user to know the often convoluted taxonomic history of all the species in the regional community will become more and more vital (Levy et al, 2014; Kelling et al, 2019). Development and testing of an automated integration tool to implement our curation system

Objective

Subspecies issues

Findings

DISCUSSION