Abstract
There have been no long-term field studies of the potential effect of spay/neuter programs on free-roaming domestic cat population sizes. To address that gap via citizen science, we are developing a novel approach to photographic mark-recapture population research that engages volunteers as both smartphone-wielding data collectors and as online data processors in building capture histories from submitted photos. Here, we present a validation study testing the accuracy of cat advocate volunteers at matching smartphone photos of cats, and we compare their success to a reference group of life science university students. We also examine feline photographic identification from two additional perspectives: what makes a volunteer better at cat identification, and what makes a cat photo more identifiable? 151 cat advocates and 17 students completed 37,800 pairwise photo comparisons using our online platform. Cat advocates’ matching attempts (n = 34,080) were correct 98.1% of the time compared with students’ 97.5% (n = 3,720). Volunteers who reported a pet cat increased their accuracy. Volunteers who held less than a bachelor’s degree, or those who volunteered with cats previously, had reduced accuracy. If a cat was a color other than black, its ability to be identified increased. We demonstrated that our citizen science volunteer sample was not only adequate at identifying individual cats in smartphone photos, but performed better than our sample of life science students—a labor pool commonly trusted to organize data from camera trap research. While photographs are the data foundation of many studies of free-roaming cats, we are the first to analyze by-eye visual identification in this species.
Highlights
AND BACKGROUNDOne of the most inflammatory topics in animal welfare and wildlife conservation is free-roaming domestic cat (Felis catus) management (Loss and Marra 2018; Lynn et al 2019)
151 cat advocates and 17 life science university students participated in this study by completing a total of 37,800 pairwise photo comparisons using our online platform (See Supplemental Files 1–5 for data analyzed)
7.9% of cat advocates had previously participated in an online citizen science project doing image identification or classification, compared with 23.5% of students
Summary
One of the most inflammatory topics in animal welfare and wildlife conservation is free-roaming domestic cat (Felis catus) management (Loss and Marra 2018; Lynn et al 2019). There is a need to control their populations to protect threatened and endangered wildlife species (Loss and Marra 2018), safeguard public health from disease and injury (Kravetz and Federman 2002), and curtail nuisance behaviors such as noisy mating activities (Levy, Isaza, and Scott 2014), urine spraying, and fighting with pets (Gramza et al 2016). While evidence exists to support the arguments that spay/neuter efforts are linked to reductions in animal shelter intake and euthanasia (Spehar and Wolf 2019), no long-term field research has demonstrated that these programs are affecting the metric of concern to conservation stakeholders: the sheer number of freeroaming cats on the landscape. This research is dismissed by cat advocates as having failed to collect data for a sufficient amount of time
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