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Citizen science

Statistical power from the people

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 1802–1803 (2022)Cite this article

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A global comparison of plant trait patterns calculated using citizen science observations versus those calculated using traditional scientific data reveals remarkable congruence between the two approaches.

The past decade has seen an explosion in citizen science, where scientific data are collected by non-specialists. Citizen science offers substantial advantages in the spatial coverage of biodiversity data, but often at a cost of data quality compared to that obtained by professional scientists. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Wolf et al.1 show that the accuracy of global patterns in plant trait data derived from citizen science are comparable to those from scientifically sampled vegetation plots. In their study, the authors harness the power of citizen science to put several critical plant traits on the global map for the very first time, including seed mass, stem specific density and leaf nitrogen per unit area. This feat was made possible by combining the >14 million vascular plant observations from iNaturalist, a citizen science tool that allows regular folk to record species occurrences via their smartphones with the TRY database2, which compiles plant trait data input by professional scientists. To assess the quality of the resulting trait maps, the authors compared estimates generated using citizen science data with trait-community-weighted means estimated by combining 95,104 professional vegetation surveys from sPlotOpen3 with data from the TRY database2. The average correlation between estimates from the two approaches was an impressive 0.46 across 18 traits.

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Fig. 1: The power of citizen science data comes from impressive sample sizes.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Evolution & Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Angela T. Moles & Zoe A. Xirocostas

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  1. Angela T. Moles
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  2. Zoe A. Xirocostas
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Correspondence to Angela T. Moles.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Moles, A.T., Xirocostas, Z.A. Statistical power from the people. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 1802–1803 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01902-z

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