Similaridade ambiental e geográfica das espécies de felinos detectada por pesquisadores e cientistas cidadãos

Abstract

Citizen science has proved to be an important ally of scientific research, mainly by providing data through platforms such as Inaturalist, which has strategies that guarantee the reduction of sampling errors such as taxonomic identification or geographic location records. However, much is questioned about the reliability of data from citizen science, given that the lack of experience on the part of citizen scientists can increase the risks of biased sampling. In this work, we evaluated the presence of biases in data from citizen science, for this, the each species. We also evaluated whether the variables: body size, habitat type and species threat level can explain the environmental and geographic variation found between the climatic and spatial envelopes of scientists and citizen scientists. In this work we found that the environmental and spatial niche described by the citizen scientists and the professional presente similarities and that species attributes such as body size and threat level explain the variation of similarity using as an example the feline species found in the world. Thus, the hypotheses of the present work were partially corroborated, and only the type of habitat could not explain the variation in climatic and spatial similarity between the citizen and professional scientist. environmental and geographic similarity between the scientific and citizen science data set of species of the felidae family was evaluated with the construction of spatial and climatic envelopes from the data. of each group and obtaining the percentage of envelope overlap for each species. We also evaluated whether the variables: body size, habitat type and species threat level can explain the environmental and geographic variation found between the climatic and spatial envelopes of scientists and citizen scientists. In this work we found that the environmental and spatial niche described by the citizen scientists and the professional presente similarities and that species attributes such as body size and threat level explain the variation of similarity using as an example the feline species found in the world. Thus, the hypotheses of the present work were partially corroborated, and only the type of habitat could not explain the variation in climatic and spatial similarity between the citizen and professional scientist.