Advantages and Drawbacks of Open-Ended, Use-Agnostic Citizen Science Data Collection: A Case Study

Citizen science projects that collect natural history observations often do not have an
underlying research question in mind. Thus, data generated from such projects can be
considered “use-agnostic.” Nevertheless, such projects can yield important insights
about species distributions. Many of these projects use a class-based data schema,
whereby contributors must supply a species identification. This can limit participation
if contributors are not confident in their identifications, and can introduce data quality
issues if species identification is incorrect. Some projects, such as iNaturalist, circumvent
this with crowdsourced species identifications based on contributed photographs, or by
grading confidence in the data based on attributes of the sighting and/or contributor.
An alternative to a class-based data schema is an open-ended (instance-based) one,
where contributors are free to identify their sighting at whatever taxonomic resolution
they are most confident, and/or describe the sighting based on attributes. This can
increase participation (data completeness) and have the benefit of adding additional
(and sometimes unexpected) information. ... mehrThe regionally-focused citizen science
website NLNature.com was designed to experimentally examine how class-based versus
instance-based schema affected contributions and data quality. Here, we show that the
instance-based schema yielded not only more contributions, but also several of ecological
importance. Thus, allowing contributors to supply natural history information at a level
familiar to them increases data completeness and facilitates unanticipated contributions.