Abstract Detail

Biodiversity Research Collecting Is More Important Than Ever—Ushering in a Collecting Renaissance

Mast, Austin [1], Pearson, Katelin [2], Buckley, Mikayla [3].

Historical Descriptions of Biotic Anomalies on Specimen Labels Inform Efforts to Mobilize Collectors on the Front Lines of Observing Change Today.

Collectors of biodiversity specimens are often ideally suited to notice anomalies in Earth’s biota.  They pay attention to what is where, when life history events occur, and other features of Life, and this can become important in many ways (e.g., when recognizing a newly established invasive species or emerging mismatches in ecological interactions).  However, our analyses of 170 anomaly terms and phrases (e.g., “abnormal”, “late”) from label data for 75 million specimens suggest that collectors remain largely untapped in this role and that their anomaly observations are hard to find and aggregate due to heterogeneity in word choice and databasing approaches and due to the varying relevance of terms (e.g., “flowering late” vs. “collected in the late afternoon”).  We have recently made progress on using machine learning to recognize anomaly descriptions in specimen records, in part with the help of 1300 volunteers on our crowdsourcing project How Weird is That? on the Zooniverse platform.  We will present our results and suggest a path towards mobilizing the collection community to rapidly and unambiguously report biotic change to stakeholders who can most effectively use the observations, such as ecologists, natural resource managers, and conservation biologists.

Related Links:
How Weird is That?
iDigBio
BIOSPEX

1 - Florida State University, Department Of Biological Science, 319 Stadium Drive, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, United States
2 - California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
3 - Florida State University, Biological Science, 319 Stadium Drive, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, USA

Keywords:
Anomaly Detection
biodiversity specimens
Herbarium
Machine Learning
Collectors
citizen science
Crowdsourcing
global change.

Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY2, Biodiversity Research Collecting Is More Important Than Ever—Ushering in a Collecting Renaissance
Location: Virtual/Virtual
Date: Tuesday, July 28th, 2020
Time: 12:30 PM
Number: SY2006
Abstract ID:415
Candidate for Awards:None