Citizen science and plant conservation: The experience of Biodibal in the Balearic Islands
Keywords:
Biodiversity, Flora, Management, Participative science, mobile appAbstract
Citizen science has emerged as a vital tool for biodiversity conservation, involving the community in the collection of scientific data. A notable example is the Biodibal project, initiated in 2017 by the University of the Balearic Islands and Red Eléctrica, which has 1 799 814 biodiversity observations in the Balearic Islands. This project allows citizens to record observations via mobile devices, which are then validated by specialists. However, it faces challenges such as nomenclature changes, difficulty in identifying taxa from images, and technical issues.
Despite representing only 5,95 % of Biodibal’s total data, citizen science observations have been crucial, with 98,63 % of them validated, covering 3827 taxa. Additionally, the project has facilitated the creation of open databases and has been used in education and research, contributing to botanical publications. Although data quality and participant motivation are challenges, citizen science has great potential for global biodiversity conservation through replicable projects like Biodibal
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References
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