Abstract
BackgroundCitizen science is becoming a mainstream approach of baseline data collection to monitor biodiversity and climate change. Dragonflies (Odonata) have been ranked as the highest priority group in biodiversity monitoring for global warming. Ischnura senegalensis Rambur has been designated a biological indicator of climate change and is being monitored by the citizen science project “Korean Biodiversity Observation Network.” This study has been performed to understand changes in the distribution range of I. senegalensis in response to climate change using citizen science data in South Korea.ResultsWe constructed a dataset of 397 distribution records for I. senegalensis, ranging from 1980 to 2020. The number of records sharply increased over time and space, and in particular, citizen science monitoring data accounted for the greatest proportion (58.7%) and covered the widest geographical range. This species was only distributed in the southern provinces until 2010 but was recorded in the higher latitudes such as Gangwon-do, Incheon, Seoul, and Gyeonggi-do (max. Paju-si, 37.70° latitude) by 2020. A species distribution model showed that the annual mean temperature (Bio1; 63.2%) and the maximum temperature of the warmest month (Bio5; 16.7%) were the most critical factors influencing its distribution. Future climate change scenarios have predicted an increase in suitable habitats for this species.ConclusionsThis study is the first to show the northward expansion in the distribution range of I. senegalensis in response to climate warming in South Korea over the past 40 years. In particular, citizen science was crucial in supplying critical baseline data to detect the distribution change toward higher latitudes. Our results provide new insights on the value of citizen science as a tool for detecting the impact of climate change on ecosystems in South Korea.
Highlights
Citizen science is becoming a mainstream approach of baseline data collection to monitor biodiversity and climate change
Records of I. senegalensis occurrence In this study, we constructed a dataset for a total of 397 records with I. senegalensis occurrence in South Korea from 1980 to 2020
Occurrence data have been collected by citizen scientists since 2003, and this category with a total of 233 observations occupied the largest proportion of the I. senegalensis distribution dataset, accounting for 58.7% of the total records (Table 1; Fig. 2C)
Summary
Citizen science is becoming a mainstream approach of baseline data collection to monitor biodiversity and climate change. Citizen science (hereafter CS), defined as the participation of the general public in scientific research, has become a mainstream approach to the collection of baseline data in ecology and environmental science (Dickinson et al 2012). Citizen scientists are compiling vast datasets of contemporary biodiversity and environmental records, and CS monitoring can help collect large volumes of observation data for various species over a wide range within an entire country (Pocock et al 2018). Observation data by citizen scientists have contributed extensively to scientific research on distributions related to climate change (Suzuki-Ohno et al 2017), phenological change (Fuccillo et al 2014), morphological variation (Moore et al 2021), and species distribution modeling (Wang et al 2018), as evidenced by many journal articles
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