Accelerating digitization of biodiversity research specimens through online public participation

A goal of the biodiversity research community is to digitize the majority of the one billion specimens in US collections by 2020. Meeting this ambitious goal requires increased collaboration and technological innovation and broader engagement beyond the walls of universities and museums. Engaging the public in digitization promises to both serve the digitizing institutions and further the public understanding of biodiversity science. We discuss three broad areas accessible to public participants that will accelerate research progress: label and ledger transcription, georeferencing from locality descriptions, and specimen annotation from images. We illustrate each activity, compare useful tools, present best practices and standards, and identify gaps in our knowledge and areas for improvement. The field of public participation in digitization of biodiversity research specimens is in a growth phase with many emerging opportunities for scientists, educators, and the public, as well as broader communication with complementary projects in other areas (e.g., the digital humanities).

The development and popularization of network information technology has been promoting network to be one of the most important channels and means of citizen participation and governmental decision-making as well. Under the background of netizen participation, new developing challenges are facing governmental decision-making as new opportunities being brought to it. This paper aims to discuss the choices of governmental administrative decision by taking netizen participation into consideration. With the popularity of the Internet, network is pervading every aspect of the society, which caused a revolution in our way of producing and living. For citizens, network has become a new method of expressing rights and interests, and an important channel of participating in the administrative decision of government. Therefore, the new form or activities for public participation called Public emerged. Public participation in the administrative decision of government is not a new topic. Actually, it's existed in modern or ancient times, in China or elsewhere. The public participation in governmental administrative decision is a significant reflection for the political democratization of a nation. At the same time, it also reflected the governess level of government on a large scale. It can effectively facilitate the benign interaction between government and citizen, and enhance the mutual understanding and recognition on policies to bring public participation into the process of government making administrative decisions. Meanwhile, public participation in administrative decisions also play a big part in lessening the resistance, legalizing the policies, improving the scientificalness of decision making and etc. it is beneficial for both the government and citizen to allow the public participation in governmental administrative decision. 1. Pay enough political recognition to Online Public Participation The initial step we faced is how to assure the political nature and political status of Online Public Participation in governmental administrative decision so that we can make Online Public Participation in governmental administrative decision a systematic way or activities for civil participation. Political recognition mainly means that government gives understanding, affirmation and support to Online Public Participation and allows them to play a part in the political life of the nation. The political recognition is a precondition for Online Public Participation in government administrative decisions and the necessary condition for Online Public Participation to get further development. The report of seventeenth congress says: All power in China belongs to people. We should expand the citizens' political participation in an orderly way from all classed, all fields, and mobilize and organize them on a most extensive scale to manage state and social affairs and economic and cultural undertakings according to law; and to improve the system of democracy, develop diverse forms of democracy, expand public participation in political affairs in an orderly way, and to ensure that the people go in for democratic elections and decision-making, exercise democratic management and supervision according to law; and to put decision-making on a more democratic and scientific way, to perfect the system of information management and decision- making support, to suggest the transparency and public participation during decision-making process, and to formulate

Purpose Collective action through public participation is essential for the success of smart cities. Therefore, this study presents two research objectives. First, the study aims to map the academic landscape of public participation in smart cities using bibliometric analysis. Second, to deepen understanding of its complexities, the study combines bibliometric analysis with social-ecological system (SES) framework to develop a conceptual SES framework for public participation in smart cities. Design/methodology/approach In this study, relevant literature was searched in the Scopus database using keywords related to smart cities and public participation. A total of 1,201 documents published before 2025, were retrieved for bibliometric analysis. Through co-citation and co-word analyses, the study identified influential publications, research themes, trends, and potential research focuses in the field of public participation in smart cities. Findings Through co-citation and co-word analyses, four co-citation clusters and six co-word clusters were identified, highlighting influential publications, research themes, trends, and potential research focuses. Moreover, this study develops a conceptual SES framework for public participation in smart cities, highlighting eleven institutional factors, sixteen social factors, and five ecological factors that influence public participation, along with their roles and impact mechanisms. Originality/value The development of the conceptual SES framework introduces a social-ecological perspective into the field of public participation in smart cities, presenting a new theoretical viewpoint. Additionally, the study’s findings can guide the formulation of inclusive smart city policies and provide valuable insights for designing future smart city-related research.

More and more methods in the area of biodiversity research grounds upon new opportunities arising from modern sensing devices that in principle make it possible to continuously record sensor data from the environment. However, these opportunities allow easy recording of huge amount of data, while its evaluation is difficult, if not impossible due to the enormous effort of manual inspection by the researchers. At the same time, we observe impressive results in computer vision and machine learning that are based on two major developments: firstly, the increased performance of hardware together with the advent of powerful graphical processing units applied in scientific computing. Secondly, the huge amount of, in part, annotated image data provided by today's generation of Facebook and Twitter users that are available easily over databases (e.g., Flickr) and/or search engines. However, for biodiversity applications appropriate data bases of annotated images are still missing. In this presentation we discuss already available methods from computer vision and machine learning together with upcoming challenges in automatic monitoring in biodiversity research. We argue that the key element towards success of any automatic method is the possibility to keep the human in the loop - either for correcting errors and improving the system's quality over time, for providing annotation data at moderate effort, or for acceptance and validation reasons. Thus, we summarize already existing techniques from active and life-long learning together with the enormous developments in automatic visual recognition during the past years. In addition, to allow detection of the unexpected such an automatic system must be capable to find anomalies or novel events in the data. We discuss a generic framework for automatic monitoring in biodiversity research which is the result of collaboration between computer scientists and ecologists of the past years. The key ingredients of such a framework are initial, generic classifier, for example, powerful deep learning architectures, active learning to reduce costly annotation effort by experts, fine-grained recognition to differentiate between visually very similar species, and efficient incremental update of the classifier's model over time. For most of these challenges, we present initial solutions in sample applications. The results comprise the automatic evaluation of images from camera traps, attribute estimation for species, as well as monitoring in-situ data in environmental science. Overall, we like to demonstrate the potentials and open issues in bringing together computer scientists and ecologist to open new research directions for either area.

Cute discourse, as a communication approach that combines informative content with interesting and soft expression, has drawn substantial attention in information communication and social media platforms studies. However, existing research has primarily concentrated on marketing effectiveness within Western frameworks, thereby leaving unanswered questions about the persuasion of cute discourse within the political sphere in non-Western contexts. Focusing on social media data, this study analyzed 5,462 government’s posts on Chinese Weibo and examined the effect of the use of cute discourse on public participation under a mixed research method that combined a coding procedure and regression model. Our results identify that the government’s posts employing cute discourse achieve higher levels of public participation, and that greater degrees of cute discourse further enhance this effect. Among these posts, cute discourse was associated with positive emotions and attraction and had a positive effect on public participation. Additionally, the influence of both the use and degree of government’s cute discourse on public participation varied across information themes. These results contribute to enriching the discourse content of social media platforms and broadening the channels for public political participation.

vast majority of locality descriptions associated with biological specimens housed in natural history museums lack the geographic coordinates required for computer-based geographic analyses. Assigning such coordinates to existing specimen records is a process called retrospective georeferencing. The georeferencing of biological collections makes those collections more valuable by allowing them to be used in spatially explicit biodiversity analyses. Here we review some of the most common problems inherent to the retrospective georeferencing of biological collections. We then attempt to classify the most common types of locality descriptions according to our own rule-application for georeferencing, which was developed as part of a larger funded effort to create an online mapping and biodiversity analysis portal for the North-central Rocky Mountains and adjacent plains. As a means of comparison with our manual computer-assisted georeferencing method, we evaluate four currently available automated georeferencing tools. We argue that these automated tools are less accurate and precise, and less time efficient, than the three computer-assisted manual protocols for natural history museums: MaNIS, MaPSTeDI, and INRAM. Nevertheless, it is clear that these automated tools represent a critical first-step in the development of accurate, precise and efficient tools which will ultimately replace or at least enhance existing manual protocols. In order to facilitate the development of better georeferencing technologies, it is critical that workers involved establish a consensus set of locality types and rules for georeferencing them which will pave the way for the next generation of semi-or fully automated tools. A collaboratively built next generation georeferencing tool should be Internet-based.

A high-resolution copy of the first of three volumes of letters from schools requesting specimens from the Museum of Economic Botany, held at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The source consists of manuscript letters from schools across Great Britain requesting specimens, often for displays and museums curated by teachers in many different kinds of schools. The file is downloadable in PDF format from the Biodiversity Heritage Library https://biodiversitylibrary.org). The work of digitisation was supported by the Mobile Museum project, funded by the AHRC. Biodiversity Heritage Library website. This document was digitised in support of research for the Mobile Museum research project, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Links: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/geography/research/mobile-museum/home.aspx https://www.kew.org/science/collections/economic-botany-collection

A high-resolution copy of the second 'Specimens Distributed' book of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany for 1901-1990, held at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The source consists of one bound volume, with dates of dispersals and names of recipients including museums, botanic gardens, schools and other institutions. There is an index of names of recipients. The file is downloadable in PDF format from the Biodiversity Heritage Library https://biodiversitylibrary.org). The work of digitisation was supported by the Mobile Museum project, funded by the AHRC. Biodiversity Heritage Library website. This document was digitised in support of research for the Mobile Museum research project, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Links: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/geography/research/mobile-museum/home.aspx https://www.kew.org/science/collections/economic-botany-collection

The article examines the formation and development trends of international standards for public participation. In the study, taking into account the practice of compliance by states with non-binding documents of international governmental and non-governmental organizations in the field of public participation, the author’s definition of international standards of public participation is given. The importance of the comments and recommendations of the Human Rights Committee on the articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, guidelines developed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other international organizations, as well as other documents is revealed. The author identifies trends in the rapid development of international standards for public participation in the context of the COVID 19 pandemic and other global problems, the coverage of public participation in all areas and its specialization. As a result of the study, recommendations were given on ensuring public participation in all areas in accordance with international standards, including accession to the Aarhus Convention, active participation of state bodies and citizens of Uzbekistan in the development of standards for public participation.

Biodiversity is fast declining especially in African countries like Nigeria with paucity of data. This study was conducted to quantify biodiversity studies in Nigeria available on the Web of Science database. Data were collected from the Web of Science core collection from 1970-2020 with the inclusion of “Biodiversity” as the search term. Of the 141, 781 global research on Biodiversity, 155 (0.1%) were conducted in Nigeria. Ecology and Environmental Science Journal were the top leading Web of Science subject category, both with 34 published articles, followed by Biodiversity Conservation (21) and Plant Science (19). Bergi et al., (2007) is the most cited article with forty-nine (49) number of citations. University of Ibadan and Luiselli L. were the affiliation and author with the highest of number of published articles on biodiversity in Nigeria respectively. Overall, there is an increasing trend of biodiversity research in Nigeria over the years. However, in comparison to the global research in biodiversity and considering the rate of biodiversity loss both locally and globally, there is a need for more biodiversity research in Nigeria. Wildlife managers and Conservationist should pay more attention to biodiversity research in Nigeria.

This study examines the impacts of collaboration and public participation on municipal growth in midsize U.S. municipalities. It specifically looks at the cases of land economic development projects across the nation and how local governments’ population and employment growth are associated with public participation and collaboration. This study employs two methods—a survey of planners and officials and GPT-3 semantic search. Using a survey of planners and elected officials, four individual variables (traditional public participation, online public participation, public service collaboration, and staff regional meetings) related to collaboration and public participation were employed. Additionally, a semantic search approach was used to understand the current trend of public participation methods in real land development cases. The findings show that informal collaboration pushes population and employment growth, but the value of citizen participation is more contentious.

Biodiversity research using digitized, internet-based natural history collections

Georeferenced species occurrence is a prerequisite in species distribution modeling and species ecosystem correlation analysis and also aids in tracking plant species and prioritizing scarce resources for conservation. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility, legacy literature of biodiversity, contemporary literature, technical reports and biodiversity surveys are important sources of species occurrence data waiting to be georeferenced. In this paper, we discussed a method used to georeference occurrences of threatened forest tree species from the above sources. Locality descriptions were initially narrowed down in geographic information system using administrative maps and further confined using two criteria: 1) elevation and 2) surface cover information from remotely-sensed images. The result was a georeferenced database of 2,067 occurrence records of 47 threatened forest species on a national scale . Each record had a unique point feature per species and enough metadata directing the database user to the source of occurrence data. The database can be used as a tool in determining priority species for specimen or germplasm collection, for taxonomic identification and historical mapping. It also serves as an integral component in spatially modeling the distribution of tree species and forest formations in the past and in a possible future scenario.

How IT and social change facilitates public participation: A stakeholder-oriented approach

Governments increasingly turn to the Internet to facilitate public participation activities, part of a recent push toward transparency, accountability, and citizen involvement in decision-making. These activities take many forms, and one specific form, the crowdsourcing model, is examined here for its effectiveness as a public participation method. In 2009, the Next Stop Design project was launched to test the crowdsourcing model in an online public participation experiment for bus stop shelter design. Drawing on the ideals of online democratic deliberation, 23 Next Stop Design participants were interviewed via instant messenger for their perceptions of the project as an effective public participation activity. Findings suggest that crowdsourcing is a promising online public participation method that may complement off–line methods.