Abstract Detail

Green digitization: online botanical collections data answering real-world questions

Willis, Charles [1], Law, Edith [2], Williams, Alex [2], Park, Daniel [1], Davis, Charles [3].

CrowdCurio: an online crowdsourcing platform to facilitate climate change studies using herbarium specimens.

Phenology is a key aspect of plant success and is vital to our understanding of how plants will respond to human-caused climate change. Yet, the availability of long-term, observational datasets on phenological responses to climate change suffers from geographic, spatial, and phylogenetic biases. Recent research has demonstrated that herbarium specimens, which have much broader long-term geography and phylogeny sampling, can provide reliable data on plant phenology. Thus, massive digitization efforts of herbarium specimens have the potential to greatly expand herbarium-based phenological research, but also pose a serious challenge regarding efficient data collection. Here, we introduce CrowdCurio, an online crowdsourcing tool for the collection of phenological data from herbarium specimens. We test its utility by having workers collect phenological data (number of flower buds, open flowers, and fruits) from specimens of two common New England species: Chelidonium majus L. and Vaccinium angustifolium Aiton. We assess the reliability of using non-expert workers (i.e., Amazon MTurk) against expert workers (i.e., trained herbarium staff). We also use these data to estimate the phenological sensitivity to temperature for both species across multiple phenophases. We found no difference in the data quality of non-experts and experts. Non-experts, however, had several advantages: they were more efficient at collecting data, provided more estimates per specimens, and collected data at a lower cost. We also found that phenological sensitivity varied across both species and phenophases. Our study demonstrates the utility of CrowdCurio as a tool for the collection of phenological data from herbarium specimens. While our study focused on the efficacy of paid non-expert workers, our results also demonstrate promise for implementing CrowdCurio as a citizen science program. Furthermore, our results highlight the insight gained from collecting large amounts of phenological data at different developmental stages to estimate multiple phenophases. We are currently greatly scaling up these efforts to investigate the impacts of climate change on plants across New England.

Related Links:
CrowdCurio Platform

1 - Harvard University, Harvard University Herbaria, 22 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
2 - University of Waterloo, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, N2L-3G1, Canada
3 - Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology / Harvard University Herbaria, 22 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

Keywords:
phenology
phenophase
Citizen Science
flowering time
fruiting time
phenological sensitivity.

Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY2, Green digitization: online botanical collections data answering real-world questions
Location: Fort Worth Ballroom 4/Omni Hotel
Date: Monday, June 26th, 2017
Time: 3:45 PM
Number: SY2006
Abstract ID:111
Candidate for Awards:None