Citizen Taxonomy in Social Media

Abstract

Citizen science is a research collaboration between scientists and volunteers who provide data for education, conservation, and environmental protection. Volunteers, often the locals in the area, provide data on species occurrence while researchers perform distribution mapping or other data analysis. Social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr can be used as platforms for the public to share their photos of species and for scientists to aid in identification. In this article, we show how social media groups can be used to generate data on species distribution of myxomycetes.