Contrasting nation-wide citizen science and expert collected data on hummingbird–plant interactions

Abstract

Citizen science has the potential to increase the efficiency of scientific data collection. However, such initiatives often focus on unique taxa for each record, not necessarily involving interspecific interactions. Moreover, whether openly available unstructured citizen science data can contribute to better understand ecological patterns is still not well understood. Here, we identify hummingbird-plant interactions recorded by amateur birdwatchers in the most popular online platform in Brazil, Wikiaves. Then, we evaluated how this information can benefit our understanding of interactions in a large Tropical country by comparing with data generated by experts. We also constructed a nation-wide meta-network to identify the structural roles of hummingbirds and plants. In total, 3210 interactions were compiled, with better hummingbirds and geographic coverage of citizen data in relation to expert data. The interaction network showed a modular pattern, and some plant species found as most frequently interacting here were similar to those found by experts. Nevertheless, when comparing the plant partners for hummingbirds featured in both expert and citizen data, the proportion of plants in common were generally low (usually less than 40%), indicating that amateur birdwatchers are mostly recording interactions not captured by scientists. Finally, as in other cases of compilation of interaction data, we found that sampling intensity (here, number of photographs) is a strong driver of interaction records, highlighting the unique challenge of separating biologically meaningful patterns from sampling artifacts in citizen science data. Our study illustrates the richness of citizen-gathered biodiversity data available in a megadiverse country, which show great potential to complement expert collected data.