Combining Citizen Science and DNA-Assisted Species Identification to Enable "A New Kind of Ecology"

Climate change is shifting species’ geographic ranges, patterns, abundances, seasonal activities, and interactions with other species. Understanding, predicting, and managing how species respond to climate change and other... [ view full abstract ]

Climate change is shifting species’ geographic ranges, patterns, abundances, seasonal activities, and interactions with other species. Understanding, predicting, and managing how species respond to climate change and other environmental changes is a critical challenge in environmental biology, which will require what Georgina Mace called "a new kind of ecology…predicated on scaling up efforts, data sharing and collaboration." Collection of these kinds of data typically requires the identification of biological specimens; yet, that task is difficult and labor-intensive, and is compounded by a dearth of taxonomic expertise – the “taxonomic impediment.” Citizen science is proposed—and has in some cases been successfully implemented—as a mechanism for expanding the scientific workforce to address difficult, large-scale or computationally intensive ecological research questions. Unfortunately, training citizen scientists to accurately identify most organisms is, like the task of identification itself, prohibitively time-consuming. Thus projects that engage the public in identifying biological specimens, including "bioblitzes", still rely heavily on professional taxonomists to identify collected specimens, and the taxonomic impediment remains in place. Automated identification tools that use morphology (e.g. Leafsnap), sound (e.g. Song Scope) and other characteristics, and online crowd-sourced photo identification services (e.g. iNaturalist, iSpot), are already being used to help citizen scientists identify unknown specimens. DNA-assisted species identification (“DNA barcoding” and related techniques) can complement these tools to empower researchers and citizen scientists alike to accurately identify organisms and enable transformative increases in the scope and scale at which ecology and biodiversity science are done. In this talk, I will introduce, explain, and demonstrate DNA barcoding for specimen identification, and discuss its potential and implications for citizen science and environmental science.