Meeting Abstract
A thorough understanding of many aspects of a species’ ecology, including its behavior, habitat use, and seasonality, often requires many observations distributed across large spatial and temporal extents. Logistical and financial considerations, however, can limit the ability of scientists to amass the large datasets needed to address these questions. One potential solution is to use extensive databases of citizen science observations collected by members of the public who are not professional scientists to quantify ecological variation of species. While citizen science data are rapidly increasing in quantity and availability, they may be subject to biases, and their suitability for ecological analyses is not always clear. We leveraged the well-researched ecology of Anolis lizards in Florida to assess whether citizen science observations are appropriate for broad scale analyses of lizard ecology. We created a database of >1500 geolocated, timestamped observations of two species of anoles, the native green anole (Anolis carolinensis) and the invasive brown anole (Anolis sagrei), from one calendar year (2017) submitted to the citizen scientist platform iNaturalist. We coded each observation for sex, morphology, behavior, and habitat use of the lizard(s) in each photograph. We assessed whether patterns in this citizen science dataset match predictions taken from the peer-reviewed literature and discuss the value of data collected by citizen scientists in complementing those generated by professional scientists.
