Can Citizen Scientists Avert Australia’s Biodiversity Crisis?

Can Citizen Scientists Avert Australia’s Biodiversity Crisis?

In 2023, a Queenslander noticed an interesting clam in the river waters of Ipswich, a town outside of Brisbane. She took a picture and uploaded it to the citizen scientist platform iNaturalist. 

The images were of freshwater gold clams, a highly invasive species that was, up to that point, found everywhere except Australia and Antarctica. 

That one image triggered Australia’s new biosecurity alert service, which enabled environmental officers to immediately remove the clams and set up a monitoring program to check their spread.

Australia is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, and while the country has strict biosecurity controls, invasive plants, animals and diseases are getting into the country, either intentionally or inadvertently.

To help identify, track and manage invasive species, the Atlas for Living Australia (ALA) — the country’s biodiversity database — now directly connects citizen science data shared on iNaturalist with the country’s biosecurity agencies.

The ALA contains over 151 million records, including 2,300 introduced species and almost 10 million weeds and pests. The initial ALA records came from museum data, but now, says ALA biosecurity analyst Andrew Turley, about 50 percent of the data comes from citizen science — most of that via iNaturalist. The ALA runs Australia’s iNaturalist node. (Australia is one of 20 countries with its own node, a local version of the app run in partnership with a local institution.) 

More than nine million Australians now use iNaturalist — about a third of the country’s total population — and they upload 10,000 new sightings every single day. There are over 11 million observations on the Australian iNaturalist node. In fact, Australians are among the top iNaturalist users in the world, with the third-most observations and second-most for species.

The biosecurity alerting system was piloted in 2020. In 2023 alone, 1,442 iNaturalist records triggered biosecurity alerts; overall, 99 percent of alerts are thanks to citizen scientists. Another example of a citizen scientist finding an invasive species was when an iNaturalist user uploaded images of the Asian shore crab in Victoria during the system’s first six months. 

“That was the first public report of Asian shore crab in Victoria, and the biosecurity department in Victoria didn’t know that it was present there either,” says Turley.

These initial proofs that the systems worked led to more support, he says, and the ALA was able to develop the system further. 

An image uploaded to iNaturalist is parsed by the app’s A.I. and also community members, who can help identify what species it is. Every week, the ALA downloads all the new Australia iNaturalist photos, explains Turley, and that data is matched against the pests, weeds and diseases that are of interest to various biosecurity departments. Then an alert is automatically sent out to local management authorities.

The ALA has spatial layers so that alerts cover broad or specific areas, and also custom shapes, where an area can be delineated. The environmental department responsible for a national park, for instance, can request only data found within the park and will only receive alerts if pests turn up within that area. “We’ve really tried to work with the biosecurity departments, find out: What do they actually need? How can we make this tool most effective for what they’re needing to protect from the threats of invasive alien species?” Turley says. 

Thomas Mesaglio, a botanical ecoinformatics doctoral student at the University of New South Wales and one of iNaturalist Australia’s site administrators, has been using the app since August 2018. It was in 2019 that user numbers and species added to the site really shot through the roof (likely, at least in part, because a similar Australian citizen science platform called BowerBird shut down) with “exponential growth in every metric that you can imagine,” he says. 

“In those last five or six years, you name it, number of records, number of species, number of observers, pick any metric you want,” he says. “They’re all just skyrocketing.”

That activity has helped identify invasives like opuntia, or prickly pear cactus, which is originally from the Americas and is on Australian state governments’ alert lists as a high priority biosecurity threat. Opuntia sightings logged in 2023 on iNaturalist prompted an alert, and biosecurity specialists went to the sites where the plants had been found and dispatched them.

“The speed that the whole system works with is such a key element,” says Mesaglio. “In the past, maybe it would have been six to eight months before the news got around to someone who could do something about it.”

Other early discoveries from iNaturalist that produced alerts include red imported fire ants — native to South America — and mouse-ear hawkweed, a plant from Europe and Asia. 

Amanda Roe, a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service and co-author of a recent paper about citizen science and biosecurity, points out that regular people have often been the first to find invasive species, like the Asian long-horned beetle in North America. “Curious people see things,” says Roe. “They notice things about the natural world, and those are the people that are often going to find something new.”

Other countries are also beginning to integrate citizen scientist data into their biosecurity efforts, including Finland, which also uses iNaturalist data. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is integrating iNaturalist into its biosurveillance, says Roe. Australia seems to be the most advanced, but, as Roe points out, Australia has the advantage of being an island. And, indeed, the country’s invasive species hotspots are all near major shipping ports, says Turley. 

The ALA biosecurity platform is a good model, Roe says, because it used what was already happening instead of creating something entirely new. 

“People are already using that platform, so why not meet people where they’re at?” she says. “There will always be more citizen scientists than experts.”

And the experts are also turning to iNaturalist Australia. Mesaglio has noted an increase in experts using iNaturalist and connecting with citizen scientists, something which Turley has also noticed. The experts frequently ask for more details, like exact locations, Turley says.

“We do often see biosecurity users getting in and contacting [users] via the chat functions in iNaturalist,” he says. 

But the ALA doesn’t promote the biosecurity alerts to iNaturalist users, and most iNaturalist users are likely unaware that their images are connected to biodiversity alerting, says Mesaglio.

In South Australia, Peter Crowcroft has been on iNaturalist since 2017. The app, he says, motivates him to pay more attention to the natural world. But he didn’t realize that iNaturalist activity was helping with biosecurity efforts. “Sometimes you get the impression that these data source points are not being utilized to their full potential,” he says. “So it’s really good that there can be some kind of alert for species which are security issues.”

It would be nice to send alerts quicker, says Turley, although that means figuring out how to manage the large amount of data that continues to be added to the database. 

Wait, you're not a member yet?

Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can.

Join Cancel anytime

“That’s going to be an ongoing challenge: As apps like iNaturalist get more users, we get more data,” he says. “It’s a continual problem that we’re actually dealing with.”

The rise of citizen science in the past couple of decades suggests that the increase in data will continue. Anyone, regardless of background or knowledge, can contribute in a “really meaningful way,” says Mesaglio, by discovering new species, identifying new and spreading invasives, and adding to data on common species. 

“All of these small acts add up and contribute to the collective big whole,” he says. “I think a large driving factor is the increasing collective awareness that you don’t have to be the world expert in a group of organisms to make a meaningful scientific contribution.”