Passive citizen science: The role of social media in wildlife observations

Citizen science plays an important role in observing the natural environment. While conventional citizen science consists of organized campaigns to observe a particular phenomenon or species there are also many ad hoc observations of the environment in social media. These data constitute a valuable resource for ‘passive citizen science’—the use of social media that are unconnected to any particular citizen science program, but represent an untapped dataset of ecological value. We explore the value of passive citizen science, by evaluating species distributions using the photo sharing site Flickr. The data are evaluated relative to those submitted to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas, the largest collection of species distribution data in the UK. Our study focuses on the 1500 best represented species on NBN, and common invasive species within UK, and compares the spatial and temporal distribution with NBN data. We also introduce an innovative image verification technique that uses the Google Cloud Vision API in combination with species taxonomic data to determine the likelihood that a mention of a species on Flickr represents a given species. The spatial and temporal analyses for our case studies suggest that the Flickr dataset best reflects the NBN dataset when considering a purely spatial distribution with no time constraints. The best represented species on Flickr in comparison to NBN are diurnal garden birds as around 70% of the Flickr posts for them are valid observations relative to the NBN. Passive citizen science could offer a rich source of observation data for certain taxonomic groups, and/or as a repository for dedicated projects. Our novel method of validating Flickr records is suited to verifying more extensive collections, including less well-known species, and when used in combination with citizen science projects could offer a platform for accurate identification of species and their location.