InsectUp: Crowdsourcing Insect Observations to Assess Demographic Shifts and Improve Classification
This addresses the difficulty of collecting large-scale insect demographic data for researchers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing crowdsourcing approaches without major methodological breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the problem of limited insect census data by proposing a crowdsourcing method to gather observations from bystanders, hikers, and entomology enthusiasts, showing that there is interest in such collaboration to help anticipate environmental threats.
Insects play such a crucial role in ecosystems that a shift in demography of just a few species can have devastating consequences at environmental, social and economic levels. Despite this, evaluation of insect demography is strongly limited by the difficulty of collecting census data at sufficient scale. We propose a method to gather and leverage observations from bystanders, hikers, and entomology enthusiasts in order to provide researchers with data that could significantly help anticipate and identify environmental threats. Finally, we show that there is indeed interest on both sides for such collaboration.