Evaluating the ability of citizen scientists to identify bumblebee species

In a paper published in PLOS ONE, professionals in the field of agroecology stress that bee monitoring projects have growing popularity throughout the world, especially among citizen scientists. Although the authors of the paper acknowledge citizen science data as highly valuable, they raise their concern about the quality of data submitted by non-specialists. In their study, they assessed the ability of citizen scientists to record and identify bumblebee species in two different British citizen science projects. The results demonstrate that expert verification is essential – the average accuracy and success rates varied between 40 and 60%. In the conclusions, the authors suggest where resources could be strengthened to improve data quality.