Public participation in the digitization of biodiversity specimens

New web resources provide scientists opportunities to engage the public in ways and at scales not previously possible. Many ecological and environmental citizen science projects focus on generating present-day occurrence data... [ view full abstract ]

New web resources provide scientists opportunities to engage the public in ways and at scales not previously possible. Many ecological and environmental citizen science projects focus on generating present-day occurrence data on populations, species, and communities to address urgent societal challenges, such as the extinction crisis and biotic responses to climate change. Biodiversity research collections provide the opportunity to produce the important historical and present-day baseline data on distributions with which to compare the new observations and project future change. However, only ten percent of U.S. specimens have been digitized, a situation that limits the discoverability and usability of specimens. A goal of the biodiversity research community is to digitize most of the remaining specimens within a decade and public engagement can provide an important strategy to accelerate digitization. Engaging citizen scientists in digitization promises to both serve the digitizing institutions and further public understanding of biodiversity science. Here we discuss three major digitization tasks that the public can participate in online: label and ledger transcribing/cataloging from digital images, georeferencing from collection locality descriptions, and specimen tagging/categorizing from images. We present the tools that have been developed to interface between collections and citizen scientists. The field of public participation in digitization of biodiversity research specimens is clearly in a growth phase with many emerging opportunities for scientists, educators, and the public. The field will benefit from broader communication with complementary or overlapping projects in other fields, such as the digital humanities.