Where do citizen-scientists go? Explaining spatial variation in the sampling effort of citizen science data across multiple taxa

<p>Poster presented at the 27th International Congress on Conservation Biology / 4th European Congress on Conservation Biology.</p> <p>Abtract: </p> <p>Open-access biodiversity databases have limitations which include: sampling bias in favour of recorder distribution, lack of survey effort assessment, and lack of coverage of the distribution of all organisms. Any technical assessment, monitoring program or scientific research should thus include an evaluation of the uncertainty of its results. Therefore, open-access databases are ethically obliged to inform about the data quality, as researchers are obliged to acknowledge this information in their analysis.</p> <p>Using data accessed via the Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) biodiversity analysis portal, we analysed spatial patterns of ignorance scores (i.e. scores for the lack and bias of sampling effort) for 13 reference taxonomic groups to further understand the observers behaviour. The data is mainly based on voluntary observations between 2000 and 2014. Our aim was to compare the effect of six geographical variables (name them) on the ignorance score among the reference taxonomic groups.