Using Citizen Science for Bird Conservation

Birds have been the most popular organisms historically for non-professional scientists around the world. In the last two decades, citizen science datasets grew exponentially and be-came “legitimized” as sources of data for scientific publications and to inform policy and conservation decisions. In her talk Dr. Szabo will talk about the value of these datasets through several past and current case studies she worked on involving birds. She will also discuss the biases inherent in these datasets and how to deal with them. The case studies she introduces span 15 years and several continents, from Australia through Asia to Brazil and cover studies on methodology, statistics, policy and conservation biology, as well as those done for pure curiosity