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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

21-Oct-2014

Contact: Brendan M. Lynch blynch@ku.edu 785-864-8855 University of Kansas @KUNews

LAWRENCE Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey. Grumpy Cat. "Peanut," the Ugliest Dog in the World. These might be a sampling of the most familiar animals to millions of users of social networking sites like Facebook.

But one doctoral student in geography at the University of Kansas recognizes social networking sites as a potential boon for scientifically documenting Earth's biodiversity, particularly in developing nations. In fact, for this idea, Vijay Barve was just honored with a Young Researchers Award from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an international organization focused on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet.

Barve said that social networks could supplement data available via established biodiversity web sites.

"Though data about birds is available on sites like GBIF, social networking would add a lot of data on groups like butterflies, moths and other insects," he said. "Basically any organism which can be identified using photographs to certain confidence would be available on social networking sites."

In a paper recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Informatics, Barve demonstrated social networks to be a viable source for photo-vouchered biodiversity records, especially those that clarify which species exist in what places within developing nations.

"There are two main reasons why geographic and taxonomic gaps exist in developing nations," he said. "First, because of colonial history, most of the historical collections are deposited with European museums and are not largely digitized yet due to lack of priority. Second, most developing countries have not invested in curating and digitizing biodiversity in their collections yet."

Barve has pored over photos of monarch butterflies and snowy owls on the photo-sharing social network Flickr, finding them to be a rich source of biodiversity data. Not just photos, but also their associated metadata, make this possible, he said.

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Beyond LOL cats, social networks could become trove of biodiversity data