Citizen Science on GBIF - 2019 - GBIF Data Blog

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Citizen Science datasets on GBIF plotted with all other (gray) GBIF datasets (>100K occurrences). There are many citizen science datasets with millions of occurrences (eBird, (Swedish) Artportalen), and the top 3 datasets on GBIF are all citizen science datasets. But in terms of number of unique species, only iNaturalist competes with large museum datasets like Smithsonian NMNH.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://data-blog.gbif.org/post/citizen-science-on-gbif-2019/
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Super interesting post - I wonder how much taxonomic issues come into play though. For example in the last figure where it says 70% of birds have been ā€˜rediscoveredā€™ with Citizen Science, iNaturalist alone has ticked of 86% (9010/10478) species of birds according to the Clements taxonomy https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/3-Aves - I assume eBird has reached a higher percentage than this. Is that 70% number driven by synonyms etc from multiple taxonomies?

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@loarie I would suspect that you are right. eBird hovers around 10K names for Birds but GBIF has

18K ā€œAcceptedā€ names. Some of them are fossils but others could be something elseā€¦

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interesting - is there a way to get the number of species from the GBIF search UI or API (e.g. to get ~10k names for Birds from eBird via GBIF)?

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Yes! You just need to click on SPECIES LIST here https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/download?dataset_key=4fa7b334-ce0d-4e88-aaae-2e0c138d049e (this will give you the species contained in the eBird dataset and the count of corresponding occurrences).

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