Abstract
Due to the increasing popularity of websites specializing in nature documentation, there has been a surge in the number of people enthusiastic about observing and documenting nature over the past 2 decades. These citizen scientists are recording biodiversity on unprecedented temporal and spatial scales, rendering data of tremendous value to the scientific community. In this study, we investigate the role of citizen science in increasing knowledge of global biodiversity through the examination of notable contributions to the understanding of the insect suborder Auchenorrhyncha, also known as true hoppers, in North America. We have compiled a comprehensive summary of citizen science contributions—published and unpublished—to the understanding of hopper diversity, finding over fifty previously unpublished country and state records as well as dozens of undescribed and potentially undescribed species. We compare citizen science contributions to those published in the literature as well as specimen records in collections in the United States and Canada, illuminating the fact that the copious data afforded by citizen science contributions are underutilized. We also introduce the website Hoppers of North Carolina, a revolutionary new benchmark for tracking hopper diversity, disseminating knowledge from the literature, and incorporating citizen science. Finally, we provide a series of recommendations for both the entomological community and citizen science platforms on how best to approach, utilize, and increase the quality of sightings from the general public.
Highlights
In the last 2 decades, a number of citizen science platforms have been developed, leading to an explosion in the amount of people enthusiastic about observing and documenting nature (Hand, 2010; Bonney et al, 2014; Cox et al, 2015; Cooper, 2016; Aristeidou et al, 2021)
In our search of the literature, we found 10 publications that listed noteworthy records of 17 species that are specified as being either documented by individual citizen scientists (1 species; McKamey and Sullivan-Beckers, 2019) or contributions made to online citizen science platforms in North America (BugGuide or Hopper Site; Table 1)
In comparison (Supplementary Figure S1), on iDigBio we found 23,499 collection records of spittlebugs, 212,098 of leafhoppers, 79,734 of treehoppers, and 78,176 of planthoppers, resulting in a total of 393,507 hopper specimens in collections across continental North America (Figure 1)
Summary
In the last 2 decades, a number of citizen science platforms have been developed, leading to an explosion in the amount of people enthusiastic about observing and documenting nature (Hand, 2010; Bonney et al, 2014; Cox et al, 2015; Cooper, 2016; Aristeidou et al, 2021). One well-known example of citizen science is eBird, a community science database that enables birdwatchers from around the world to contribute observations of birds (Sullivan et al, 2009; Amano et al, 2016) This enormous, long-term, and continuously growing dataset of bird count data consists of nearly a billion observations (Neate-Clegg et al, 2020) and can allow scientists to perform robust studies such as assessing avian population trends (Clark, 2017; Walker and Taylor, 2017; Horns et al, 2018; Fink et al, 2020), monitoring bird migration (Fournier et al, 2017; Horton et al, 2018), and helping inform the conservation of threatened species (Sullivan et al, 2017; Robinson et al, 2018; Lees et al, 2021). Research has shown that while documentation of birds by the public has significantly increased in recent years around the world, data accumulation for non-avian taxa has not accelerated (Amano et al, 2016)
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