Native bee watch: assessing the efficacy of a citizen science project monitoring native bees in Fort Collins, Colorado
Date
2018
Authors
Mason, Lisa, author
Kondratieff, Boris, advisor
Seshadri, Arathi, advisor
Bruyere, Brett, committee member
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Abstract
As the world's human population continues to grow, urban areas continue to expand, and natural spaces become more fragmented leading to dilution and loss of natural resources. Of the organisms that depend on natural resources, pollinators could face significant impacts including habitat loss, fragmentation, and deterioration. Pollinators provide substantial ecosystem services such as plant reproduction and food production for human and animals. However, urban areas are rapidly expanding and understanding its impact on insects, such as bees, is critical. One method to understand the effects of urbanization on ecosystems is to involve urban residents in exploring the components of the ecosystem around them by engaging, educating, and empowering urbanites through citizen science. Citizen science is defined as involving non-scientists in collecting data for a scientific or research project and many times contribute to a large database. Scientists are capitalizing on citizen scientist availability and enthusiasm to increase capacity, address funding shortcomings for research and satisfy the need to meet an outreach-related component. Data accuracy is one of the main concerns that scientists have with citizen science programs. Several studies have assessed the quality of citizen science data to comprehend the underlying problems and devise effective future protocols. However, the consensus is that researchers do not yet fully understand the error potential in citizen science data possibly because data accuracy does not have a reliable definition and there are few consistent metrics on data accuracy. Knowing that pollinator conservation is an attractive issue for urban citizens, and recognizing the hurdles encountered with citizen science data, we launched Native Bee Watch, a citizen science project on urban pollinators in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, specifically to determine whether citizen scientists can collect accurate data on native bees and develop a protocol that yields accurate data. Three gardens were monitored from the last week of May through mid-September in 2016 and in 2017. Citizen scientists completed a two-hour training and spent time with the researchers in the field to ensure data accuracy. Data was collected by using the Focal Plant Sampling Procedure that was modified from animal behavior studies. Citizen science data was compared with data collected by professional researchers. Both used the exact same methods to collect data. Spearman's Rank Correlation was used to compare the citizen science data and the researcher-only data. An Urban Bee Habitat Quality index was obtained by multiplying rarified morphospecies estimate with abundance for each sampling period to determine the habitat quality using eight morphological groups of bees. Results show citizen science data was comparable to the researcher-only data. Spearman's Rank Correlation coefficients ranged 0.88 to 0.98 indicating a strong correlation between citizen science and researcher data. The habitat quality of citizen science data and the habitat quality of researcher data was not significantly different. The results indicate that the training protocols for citizen scientists were effective in having them collect comparable data to researchers. The Urban Bee Habitat Quality Index demonstrates that data collected by citizen scientists at a broad-level such as morphological categories can be used to evaluate habitat quality. Part of the training protocol for citizen scientists was continuous volunteer engagement through trainings, newsletters, and researchers working individually with citizen scientists. Results suggest the training protocols in this study were effective since the data collected by citizen scientists was significantly comparable to researcher data, indicating that citizen science can be a valuable tool to monitor native bees at a broad scale in urban areas.
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Subject
Colorado
pollinators
citizen science
urbanization
native bees