Send message to Authors

Poster Short Abstract

Citizen science plays vital role in biodiversity data generation. Our global analysis of GBIF shows that contributions from citizen science platforms are notable, and these contributions are driven more by country’s ecological uniqueness and biodiversity value than by its socio-economic development.

Poster Abstract

Among the top five publishers on GBIF, the world’s largest biodiversity database, three are citizen science platforms: the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, iNaturalist, and Observation.org. iNaturalist and Observation.org host the most cited datasets, while since joining in 2013, Cornell Lab has become GBIF’s largest contributor. Citizen science now dominates GBIF data: Cornell’s share of records rose from 18% in 2001 to 80% in 2023, iNaturalist – from 1% to 7%, and Observation.org – from 0.4% to 4.4%.

Analyses of global statistical data revealed that socioeconomic factors play a lesser role than a country's biodiversity value. Only inbound tourism and land area, which can also be indirectly related to biodiversity values, exhibit a moderate correlation (0.5 < r ≤ 0.7) with the number of identifiers, observers, observations, and species recorded on iNaturalist. In contrast, socio-economic factors such as population size, the Human Development Index, life expectancy, years of schooling, and GNI per capita show no significant impact on the development of citizen science (r < 0.5). At the same time, biodiversity indicators such as the number of endemic species, total species richness, and species with low occurrences exhibit the strongest correlations (r > 0.7) with the number of general observations, as well as with the number of identifiers on iNaturalist. Therefore, the natural factors such as land area and high, unique biodiversity may explain the greater number of recorded species on iNaturalist and eBird.