Tag: social media

How can social media users help researchers with ecological or biodiversity studies?

Images and videos on social media platforms like Instagram can help sample species occurrence data. Here’s how

Guest blog post by Melanie Werner

Researchers studying the distribution of species need information about where the plant or animal species in question occurs. This usually requires a field study, which is costly, time-consuming and often CO2-intensive. In addition, not all locations where species occur are accessible to humans, such as high mountain areas. As a result, the full range of species is often not covered and the availability of species information is a major challenge for ecological research.

Social media and citizen science projects offer a great potential to increase this availability. Citizen science refers to the involvement of non-experts in scientific projects. In the case of ecological studies, for example, this is the sampling of species occurrences. Thanks to smartphones – capable of capturing high-quality photos and recording precise locations – the ability to gather and share species information has grown significantly. It’s quite simple: take a photo, save the coordinates, upload it, and researchers can use this data to map species distributions. User-friendly platforms or Apps like iNaturalist have become invaluable for this purpose, enabling researchers and citizen scientists to share and utilize occurrence data to advance ecological understanding.

Process of species occurrence data sampling by citizen science projects.

Although some people are interested in and help with such projects, they do not yet reach a broad mass of people. In our study, we explore the potential of the social media platform Instagram, which is one of the largest social media platforms with 2 billion users worldwide and millions of daily uploads. We hypothesize that even more species occurrence data is being generated on this platform, often without users realising its scientific value.

We searched for Instagram posts from 2021 to 2022 in which the tree species Nothofagus pumilio and the location of the photo can be identified. The deciduous species N. pumilio occurs at the treeline in the southern Andes. The species’ vibrant orange-red autumn colouring, in combination to spectacular landscapes, makes it a popular photo motif for tourists, hikers, and locals alike resulting in numerous Instagram posts. Because treelines are often sensitive to climate change, studying the distribution and dynamics of this species is of particular interest.

Nothofagus pumilio at Mount Fitz Roy, Patagonia (Marina Zvada,  2024 available at: https://unsplash.com/de/fotos/blick-auf-ein-gebirge-in-der-ferne-vMoLf1OrB-k?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash)

Our study began by searching Instagram for specific hashtags related to the species (#nothofaguspumilio and #lenga), as well as for locations through location tags, hashtags, and descriptions within posts. This approach allowed us to identify as many images with N. pumilio as possible, even if the users were unaware of its presence.

To select suitable posts, we focused on those where the species could be clearly identified, the location was described, and landscape elements (e.g. mountains, waterbodies, glaciers, urban and tourist area) are visible in the image, that could also be recognised in satellite imagery. For each post, we mapped at least one point at the location where the photo was taken. Additionally, we included occurrences of N. pumilio visible in the background, such as autumn-coloured treelines. This approach ensured a more comprehensive and evenly distributed sampling of the species’ range. The next image illustrates the sampling process of a post captured at Laguna Capri with Mount Fitz Roy in the background.

Suitable Instagram post (fernando.v.fotografia, 2022, left) and four transferred points with landscape elements (red boxes, right) that helped to identify the location, which is also described in the post with location tag and post caption.

In this way, we were able to generate 1238 Instagram ground truthing points. These points can be directly used in ecological studies. However, it is important to note that our Instagram ground truthing points, like most citizen science data, is spatially biased. This means that locations can only be captured where people have access, leaving remote or high-altitude areas unrepresented.

For this reason, we added a remote sensing method to our study. As this deciduous species forms mono-species forests at the treeline, it can also be identified in satellite imagery. The occurrence data obtained through supervised classification was then validated using the Instagram ground truthing points. This approach allows us to generate less-biased occurrence data for the species across its entire 2000 km latitudinal range.

All 1238 Instagram ground truthing points sampled by our approach (left) and the remote sensing result (right).

Participating in citizen science projects is an essential contribution to research. We encourage you to explore citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist, eBird, or naturgucker, and to include hashtags and detailed location descriptions – ideally with coordinates – when posting your holiday or everyday photos on Instagram. Every contribution helps!

Research article:

Werner M, Weidinger J, Böhner J, Schickhoff U, Bobrowski M (2024) Instagram data for validating Nothofagus pumilio distribution mapping in the Southern Andes: A novel ground truthing approach. Frontiers of Biogeography 17: e140606. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.17.140606

Pensoft launches official Weibo account to expand global reach

The Pensoft team is looking forward to engaging in conversations with its Chinese authors, editors, and readers.

Scholarly publisher Pensoft is excited to announce it is now on Chinese social media platform Weibo. The move is aimed at fostering stronger connections with researchers, academics, and enthusiasts in China, which in turn will enhance the dissemination of scientific knowledge and facilitate international collaboration.

With over half a billion active users, Weibo is a powerful social media platform that combines the functionalities of microblogging and social networking. The Pensoft team is looking forward to engaging in real-time conversations with its Chinese audience, sharing insights, and receiving their feedback.

The launch coincides with the Dragon Boat Festival, a significant cultural event in China that commemorates the ancient poet Qu Yuan and symbolizes unity and teamwork. 

The move aims to make Pensoft’s publications and updates more accessible to Chinese researchers, allowing them to stay informed about the latest scientific discoveries and advancements. In addition, it offers an excellent opportunity for Pensoft to foster collaborations with Chinese institutions, researchers, and academic societies.

As a pioneer in open-access publishing, Pensoft will also use its Weibo account to promote the benefits of open access, making sure Chinese research reaches a global audience without paywalls.

“China, with its rapidly growing research output and a burgeoning community of scholars, represents a significant segment of the global academic landscape. Recognizing the importance of engaging with this vibrant community, Pensoft’s decision to establish a presence on Weibo underscores its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility in scientific publishing,” says Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft.

We invite you to join Pensoft’s Weibo account to learn all about our latest scientific discoveries and publishing updates.

Entangled “her”stories – How to create an open multi-linked dynamic dataset of plant genera named for women

Which plant genera do you know that are named for women? Who were/are they?

Guest blog post by  Siobhan Leachman, Sabine von Mering, Heather Lindon & Carmen Ulloa Ulloa

How it all began

A post on social media asked about plant genera named for women and sparked a lively discussion with many contributors. This simple question was not as easily answered as initially thought. The resulting informal working group tackled this topic remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. The team was motivated by the desire to amplify the contribution of women to botany through eponymy. The work of this team has so far resulted in a paper in Biodiversity Data Journal, presentations at several conferences, and a linked open dataset.

Prior to our international collaboration, no dataset was available to answer these simple questions and the required information was scattered in many different data sources. We set out to bring these data together and in doing so developed and refined our workflow. Our data paper documents this innovative workflow bringing together the various data elements needed to answer our research questions. Ultimately we created a Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset that amplified the names of women and female mythological beings celebrated through generic names of flowering plants.

Linking the Data

During our research process we focused on pulling data from a wide variety of sources while at the same time proactively sharing the data generated as widely as possible. This was done by adding and linking it to multiple public databases and sources (push-pull) including the International Plant Name Index (hereafter IPNI), Tropicos®, Wikidata, Bionomia and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (hereafter BHL).

Visualisation of our workflow to create a working list of flowering plant genera named for women. 

For our list of genera, each of the protologues were reviewed to confirm the etymology or eponymy. To find the generic prologues, we searched botanical databases such as IPNI and Tropicos, openly accessible providers of digital publications and other digital libraries and websites that provide free access to such publications. Here the BHL was invaluable as the majority of protologues and many other relevant publications were openly accessible through this digital library. Where no digital publication was available we accessed scientific literature through our affiliated institutions.

For the women, our starting point was the “Index of Eponymic Plant Names – Extended Edition” by Lotte Burkhardt (2018). We manually extracted all genera honouring women.  This dataset was supplemented with other sources including IPNI (2023), Mari Mut (2017-2021), a 2022 updated version of Burkhardt’s document (Burkhardt 2022), as well as suggestions received from colleagues and generated from our own research.

We collected the following information as structured data: information on the woman honoured, the genera named in honour of the woman, the year and place of the protologue or original publication (the nomenclatural reference), the author(s) of the genus name, and the link to the protologue or original publication if available online.

Wikidata

Wikidata was the central data repository and linking mechanism for this project as it provided structured data that can be read and edited by humans and machines and it acts as a hub for other identifiers. As such Wikidata played a central role in semantic linking and enriching of our data.

Wikidata items for the plant genera were created or enriched with information about the name, the author(s) of the genus and the year of publication. Those statements were referenced using the original publication. If the protologue was available on BHL, the BHL bibliographic or page number was added to that reference, thus creating a digital link improving access to the protologue. While undertaking this work we also collated a list of all those public domain publications that appeared to be absent from BHL. We passed on this list to BHL and requested these texts be scanned and added to BHL for the benefit of everyone.

We then added a named after statement to the Wikidata item for the appropriate plant genera linking that item to the Wikidata item for the woman honoured. Wikidata items for the women honoured were newly created or enriched. We researched each person and her contributions, plus information on mythological figures where necessary, and added this information to Wikidata items. Our work also included disambiguating the woman from other people with identical or similar names. 

To amplify the women’s contributions to science and to enrich the wider (biodiversity) data ecosystem, we linked to other Wikidata items and websites or databases by adding other relevant identifiers. For example if the women were botanists, botanical collectors or other naturalists, we used the author property to link the women to publications written by them. In addition, we added the women to Bionomia and attributed specimens collected or identified by them to their profiles.

Our work also included enriching Wikidata items of taxon authors. IPNI and Tropicos were searched for these author names, and websites such as BHL, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) or other specialist databases were consulted. Corrections or newly researched information on taxon authors was placed not just in Wikidata but was also sent together with the corresponding references to IPNI and Tropicos. This information was then used by those organizations to update these databases accordingly. 

As a result of our data being placed in Wikidata it is available to be queried via the Wikidata Query Service.  

Our Goal Achieved

As a result of our project, we published a dataset of 728 genera honouring women or female beings. This was a nearly twenty-fold increase in the number of genera linked to women in Wikidata. Our analysis paper on this data is forthcoming.

Notable Women 

Monsonia L.

All of us came away from this research with a favourite story. One that stood out was Ann Monson, for whom Linnaeus named Monsonia. Linnaeus wrote a delightful letter to her about their creating, platonically of course, a kind of plant love-child between them, in the form of this new genus.

Translated from Latin : “….Lock these [seeds] in a pot, and place them in the window of the chamber towards the sun, when it bursts forth in February, and in the first summer the sun blooms and lasts the most beautiful Alstromeria, which no one has seen in England, and you bring forth no flowers. If it should come to pass, as I wish, if you offer our flames, I would only wish to beget with you an only child, as a pledge of my love, little Monsonia, by which you may perpetuate the fame of Lady in the kingdom of Flora, who was the Queen of Women.”

Fittonia Coem.

Two eponymous women with an interesting story are Sarah Mary Fitton and her sister Elizabeth. They wrote Conversations on Botany in 1817 accompanied by colour engravings of flowers which popularised botany with women. The genus Fittonia was named in their honour.

Chanekia Lundell

Another woman honoured in a plant genus was Mercedes Chanek, a Mayan plant collector who worked in the 1930’s for Cyrus Longworth Lundell and collected for the University of Michigan in British Honduras, today Belize. Very little is known about her life and work. However, her collections are detailed in Tropicos and Bionomia, and you can see the genus named for her by Lundell in IPNI under Chanekia.

Medusa Lour. and other genera

Medusa (c. 1597), by Caravaggio

An example of a mythological female being honoured in several plant names is that of Medusa, who has the most genera named after her, six, more than any real woman!

We hope that our data paper inspires others to use the methodology and workflow described to create other linked open datasets, e.g. celebrating and amplifying the contributions of underrepresented or marginalised groups in science.

Data paper: 

von Mering S, Gardiner LM, Knapp S, Lindon H, Leachman S, Ulloa Ulloa C, Vincent S, Vorontsova MS (2023) Creating a multi-linked dynamic dataset: a case study of plant genera named for women. Biodiversity Data Journal 11: e114408. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.11.e114408

How to get people interested in invasive species?

While blacklists are an effective tool for preventing and managing new biological invasions, they don’t always raise public awareness of invasive alien species, a new study published in the open-access journal NeoBiota found. Important policy-making initiatives do not necessarily raise public awareness about biological invasions, and efforts should be more focused on supporting policy-making with well-planned communication campaigns, the research concludes.

Catchy news and viral videos work best to attract public attention to invasive alien species

Blacklists are one of the most common policy measures to limit biological invasions. They identify small groups of highly impactful invasive alien species: species introduced outside their native range that threaten biodiversity. By doing so, they inform key decision-makers, who then impose limitations or bans on their trade and introduction, or set requirements about specific actions to manage already established populations.

While they have been found to be effective at preventing and managing new biological invasions, we don’t know if blacklists actually raise public awareness of invasive alien species. In principle, they could do so, as they might attain a certain echo in the media and provide the general public with notorious examples of invasive alien species.

Coypu. Photo by Aurelio Perrone

In 2016, the European Union published the List of Invasive Alien Species of Union concern, which contains species that are banned from import, trade, and release in Europe. It had a certain echo in the media, and having come at a time where Internet searches are so pervasive that they can be used to measure public attention,  the Union List made a good case study for exploring blacklist impact on public awareness.

Grey squirrels. Photos by Sandro Bertolino

A research study, coordinated by Jacopo Cerri from the University of Primorska, Slovenia, and Sandro Bertolino from the University of Turin, Italy, explored if the publication of the Union List increased visits of the  Italian Wikipedia pages about invasive alien mammals, many of which were included in the list. Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia and a major source of information for motivated Internet users who go beyond search engines such as Google. As a comparison, the researchers used visits to Wikipedia pages about native mammals in Italy, and adopted a causal impact analysis to quantify differences.

The study found no effect of the publication of the Union lists over visits to Italian Wikipedia pages of invasive alien mammals, compared to pages about native mammals. After 2016, there were single peaks of visits to pages of some of the species, probably caused by viral videos and news about large-scale control initiatives or mass escapes from captivity. In one instance, peaks in visits aligned with news about the coypu – at the time, several national media outlets ran stories addressing the concerns of public administrations regarding the rodent’s impact on the stability of river banks. Similarly, a peak observed between late 2018 and February 2019 was likely caused by news about the release of 4,000 minks from a fur factory in Northern Italy, which attracted considerable attention in the national and regional media.

These attention peaks, however, did not last in time and don’t reflect a systematic change in public awareness about invasive alien species.

“Overall, our findings indicate that blacklists, despite having the potential to raise public awareness towards biological invasions, might fail to do so in practice,” the researchers conclude.

“Agencies who want to achieve this goal should rather develop tailored communication campaigns, or leverage on sensational news published in the media.”
 

Research article:

Cerri J, Carnevali L, Monaco A, Genovesi P, Bertolino S (2022) Blacklists do not necessarily make people curious about invasive alien species. A case study with Bayesian structural time series and Wikipedia searches about invasive mammals in Italy. NeoBiota 71: 113-128. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.71.69422

Decade-old photographs shared on social media give away a new species of pygmy grasshopper

While scrolling through iNaturalist – a social network where professional and citizen scientists share their photographs, in order to map biodiversity observations from across the globe – a group of students from Croatia discovered a couple of curious pictures, taken in 2008 in the Peruvian rainforest and posted in 2018. What they were looking at was a pygmy grasshopper sporting a unique pattern of lively colors. The motley insect was nothing they have so far encountered in the scientific literature.

While scrolling through iNaturalist – a social network where professional and citizen scientists share their photographs, in order to map biodiversity observations from across the globe – a group of students from Croatia discovered a couple of curious pictures, taken in 2008 in the Peruvian rainforest and posted in 2018. What they were looking at was a pygmy grasshopper sporting a unique pattern of lively colors. The motley insect was nothing they have so far encountered in the scientific literature.

The scientist and photographer Roberto Sindaco, Museo Civico di Storia naturale (Torino, Italy) graciously shared his camera roll with Niko Kasalo, Maks Deranja, and Karmela Adžić, graduate students under the mentorship of Josip Skejo, all currently affiliated with University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science, Croatia. Together, they published a paper describing the yet to be named insect in the open-access scientific journal Journal of Orthoptera Research.

Typically, new species are described from specimens collected from their natural habitats and then deposited in a museum to be preserved for future reference. The authors, possessing several high-quality photographs, decided to challenge the norm and name the new species based on photographs only. The paper was initially rejected, but a compromise was reached—it could be published with the species name removed.

The International Code of Zoological nomenclature is a document that contains regulations for proper scientific naming of animal species. It allows naming species from photographs, but the practice is generally looked down upon. Thus, the authors decided to use the nameless species to draw attention to this problem and bring more clarity. Names in zoology consist of two words: the genus name and the species name. As the species name was denied, the grasshopper is now mysteriously referred to as „the nameless Scaria“.

Another important message of this paper is how citizen science portals, such as iNaturalist, allow everybody interested in nature to contribute to ‘real’ scientific work by posting their findings online.

The authors believe that including laypeople in the scientific process can help bridge the communication gap between scientists and the general population, dissipating the growing suspicion towards science. The researchers urge everybody to engage with nature around them and capture its beauty with their camera lens. 

“Only by interacting with nature can we truly feel how much we might lose if we do not take care of it, and care is urgently needed,”

said the authors of the study.
Male of the nameless Scaria species
Photo by Roberto Sindaco

Original source:

Kasalo N, Deranja M, Adžić K, Sindaco R, Skejo J (2021) Discovering insect species based on photographs only: The case of a nameless species of the genus Scaria (Orthoptera: Tetrigidae). Journal of Orthoptera Research 30(2): 173-184. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.30.65885

All articles published in Pensoft journals at your fingertips with the Researcher app

Following a recent integration with the novel, social network-style research discovery app Researcher, the scholarly platform ARPHA has taken yet another step to ensure scholarly publications from across its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio are as easy to find and read as possible. Now, research papers published in all Pensoft’s and all other journals hosted on ARPHA Platform can reach the 1.8 million current users of Researcher directly on their smartphones.

Following a recent integration with the novel, social network-style research discovery app Researcher, the scholarly publishing platform ARPHA has taken yet another step to ensure scholarly publications from across its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio are as easy to find and read as possible. Now, research papers published in all Pensoft’s, as well as all other journals hosted on ARPHA, can reach the 1.8 million current users of Researcher directly on their screens.

Similarly to the world’s best known and used social media networks: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, Researcher allows its users, scientists and academics, to follow their favourite scholarly journals and topics, in order to receive their content in a personalised newsfeed format, either on their phones or computers. Thus, they can stay up to date with the latest research in their scientific fields by simply scrolling down: much like what they are already used to in their everyday life outside academia. 

Similarly to the well-known social network apps, Researcher lets users bookmark papers to go back to later on and even invite friends to join the platform. Furthermore, the users can also synchronise their accounts with their ORCID iDs, in order to load their own papers on their profiles on Researcher. 

The Researcher app fetches new publications from all indexed journals several times a day, thus ensuring that a user’s newsfeed is updated in almost real time. Now, the ARPHA-hosted journals have joined the 17,000 academic outlets from across the sciences already sharing their publications on the app.

“At Pensoft, we are perfectly aware that good and open science practices go far beyond cost-free access to research articles. In reality, Open Science is also about easier findability and reusability, that is the probability one stumbles across a particular research publication, and consequently, cite and build on the findings in his/her own studies. By indexing our journals with Researcher, we’re further facilitating the discoverability of their content to the benefit of the authors who trust us with their work,”

says ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

“We share ARPHA’s belief that Open Science means more than just free access – it means giving scholarly and scientific content the best chance to get in front the right reader at the right time. Our mission is to make sure that scientists and researchers never miss vital research. This partnership will ensure that distribution to our users across the world is built into the ARPHA platform – boosting discoverability and smoothing the path to impact,”

adds Olly Cooper, CEO of Researcher.

Follow ARPHA on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Undergraduate student takes to Twitter to expose illegal release of alien fish in Japan

Posing a significant threat to the native biodiversity in Japan, specifically that of threatened aquatic insects, some alien fishes, such as the bluegill, have become the reason for strict prohibitions. All activities potentially capable of introducing the species into the wild are currently punishable by either a fine of up to 3 million yen for a person (100 million yen for corporations), or a prison sentence of up to 3 years.

Recently, ten years after the law has been adopted, illegal release of bluegill fish has been reported for the first time with the help of a post on Twitter from Akinori Teramura, undergraduate student at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and second author of the present study. The case is reported and discussed by him and two scientists, affiliated with Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Natural History, Japan, in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

In June 2015, Akinori Teramura tweeted two photographs of the invasive bluegill fish, both adults and juveniles, along with two young goldfish, which do not belong to the local fauna, either. In his post he identified the species and shared his surprise at the irresponsibility of the people who had released the fish. When lead author Dr Yusuke Miyazaki saw the tweet, he signalled his colleagues with the idea to publish the information as a scientific report.

The student found them in an outdoor public pool in Yokohama city, Japan, while it was being cleaned before being opened ahead of the summer. Usually, these facilities are closed to the public during the colder seasons and it is then when native aquatic insect species, such as dragonflies and diving beetles, find spawning and nursery habitats in them. Curiously enough, though, the pool had been isolated from natural waters since its construction.

7577_ZK_Data-mining and Twitter img3

Therefore, the researchers conclude that the alien fishes have most likely been released from an aquarium from a local shop or an aquarist who no longer wanted them. However, the authors note that according to the law, keeping bluegill fish in a home aquarium is illegal as well.

“Our report demonstrates an example of web data mining in the discipline of Citizen Science,” say the authors. “Web data mining has been rapidly developing over recent years, and its potential continues to expand.”

“Community awareness of this issue needs to be improved, and widespread reporting of cases such as this one will help,” they conclude.

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Original source:

 

Miyazaki Y, Teramura A, Senou H (2016) Biodiversity data mining from Argus-eyed citizens: the first illegal introduction record of Lepomis macrochirus macrochirus Rafinesque, 1819 in Japan based on Twitter information. ZooKeys 569: 123-133. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.569.7577

Flickr and a citizen science website help in recording a sawfly species range expansion

Social network Flickr and citizen science website BugGuide have helped scientists to expand the known range of a rarely collected parasitic woodwasp, native to the eastern United States. Partially thanks to the two online photograph platforms, now the species’ distribution now stretches hundreds of miles west of previous records. Previously known from only 50 specimens mainly from the Northeast, now the species was discovered in the Ozark Mountains by researchers from the University of Arkansas. Their study is published it in the open access journal Biodiversity Data Journal.

Spurred on by the find, Michael Skvarla, a Ph.D. candidate at the university, contacted retired sawfly expert David Smith who alerted him to a hundred unpublished specimens housed in the United States National Entomology Collection at the Smithsonian, many of which were collected as bycatch in surveys that targeted invasive species like emerald ash borer andAsian longhorned beetle. Additional specimens from Iowa, Minnesota, and Manitoba, which also represent significant western range expansions, were found after users posted photos of the species on the social network Flickr and the citizen science website BugGuide.

“We used two resources – photos on social media and bycatch from large trapping surveys – which are often underutilized and I was really happy we could work both of them into the paper,” said Skvarla, the lead author. “This work highlights their utility, as well as the importance of maintaining biological collections like the U.S. National Collection and continuing to collect in undersampled regions like the Ozark Mountains.”

Parasitic woodwasps attack the immature stages of longhorned beetles, jewel beetles, and other woodwasps which bore into wood and have long fascinated entomologists because of this parasitoid nature, which is unique among woodwasps, and rarity in collections. The Arkansas specimens, which belong to the species Orussus minutus and motivated the initial research into the group, were collected as part of a larger survey of the insect fauna around the Buffalo National River.

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Original Source:

Skvarla, M.J., Tripodi, A., Szalanski, A., Dowling, A.P.G. 2015. New records of Orussus minutusMiddlekauff, 1983 (Hymenoptera: Orussidae) represent a significant western range expansion. Biodiversity Data Journal, 3: e35793. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.3.e5793