How does citizen science contribute to biodiversity research?

There are many projects to choose from that use CS as a tool to conduct scientific research. Based on the high number of users, I have selected to present the three networking resources iNaturalist, eBird, and Zooniverse. In addition, a presentation on the project Sea Slugs of Southern Norway by the University Museum of Bergen is given as I am currently involved through the writing of my master thesis on a group of sea slugs. Let’s have a look at how those project have managed to engage citizens to contribute to science. 

iNaturalist
iNaturalist is an interactive social networking resource that allows members from all over the world to collaborate and contribute to biodiversity research. The webpage iNaturalist.org was founded in 2008 as part of a master’s project at the UC Berkley’s School of Information and was continued with after graduation. Numerous collaborations lead to an expansion of iNaturalist, such as becoming an integrated project at the California Academy of Sciences (2014) and the National Geographic Society (2017). It was also in 2017 that the first version of the iNaturalist app was launched, connecting people and nature through on-hand technology ever since. Both the webpage and the mobile application are widely available and user friendly, lowering the threshold to actively get involved and start networking on an international basis.
The goal of the project iNaturalist is to inspire citizens to record biodiversity. The simplicity of uploading pictures of species that will be linked to specimen records has encouraged more than two million scientists and naturalists to join this platform, share their findings and identify specimens. Not only do we learn more about the species present in our world, we also record their geographic locations and create a world-wide map of where the species occur. Observations are considered relevant when verified by at least two users and hence suitable for sharing on platforms such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Being updated on an almost daily basis, iNaturalist provides current and relevant information, making it possible for citizen scientists and researchers to follow up on species distribution and abundance.
iNaturalist provides access to original content, as well as links and references to other credible sources, making this platform highly conventional for scientific research. The fact that iNaturalist has been cited in dozens of research articles in many prestigious journals provides direct evidence of the projects credibility and proves it to be comprehensive and useful on many levels. Find some examples below in the further reading recommendations.

eBird
eBird is an online database sharing knowledge about observations, distribution and abundance of birds among recreational and professional birders around the globe. When launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in 2002, the platform was restricted to sightings in the Western Hemisphere. In 2008, the database expanded to include observations from New Zealand and again extended their scope to a global coverage in 2010, evolving into a collective enterprise. Today, eBird is the worldwide largest citizen science project on biodiversity research with more than 100 million registered bird sightings each year, collaborating with hundreds of partner groups for regional data entry portals, data review, engagement, and local impact on the conservation of birds and their habitats (Sullivan et al., 2014).
eBird started with the simple idea that every birdwatcher comes with various levels of knowledge and experience that should be shared with the public community. Their goal is to increase the availability of bird data and freely share it to actuate new approaches in biodiversity research, conservation biology, and education. To motivate birders to share their findings, eBird provides easy-use checklists on bird sightings, connected to photos and audio recordings, in addition to real-time maps of species distribution and abundance at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Annual updates help keeping records from citizen scientists current with changes in our knowledge on the number of existing bird species and their habitat occupations year-round. Besides the web portal, the eBird free mobile app was launched in 2014, allowing offline data collection anywhere in the world. Each user has the option to receive alerts on bird sightings, thereby engaging birders to head out in the field.
eBird has provided data on bird research worldwide, been used in hundreds of conservation assessments, and been cited in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. The active use of eBird data yields direct evidence of a credible project and proves it to be comprehensive in many fields. Find attached three research articles that have used eBird data to conduct their studies, all published this year.

Zooniverse
The web portal Zooniverse was launched in 2009 and is owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance, an international cooperation of educators, software developers, and scientists who create and utilize online-based people-powered projects to expand public understanding of research and advance scientific research itself. Zooniverse originated from the crowdsourced astronomy project Galaxy Zoo (launched 2007) and has become one of the world’s largest and most successful citizen science portals with more than a million volunteers assisting professional researchers. As an umbrella project, it covers more than a hundred recent academic projects around the world that require active public participation to complete various research tasks.
Today, the portal hosts 110 projects with disciplines ranging from astronomy, natural sciences, and climate science to social sciences and arts. Each project has its own site with information on the launch date, number of registered volunteers, and the percentage of completion. In addition, users can discuss topics and share their findings on the Zooniverse discussion boards fitted to each project. Most of the work asked of by the volunteers concerns classification of data. One can also sign up to become a beta tester of projects to make sure they work properly prior to their launch, assessing their suitability. When signing up as a project moderator, one can help facilitate group discussions and function as a link between the project and its volunteers. If you are interested to know more about a certain project you will be guided to the project’s own website and may join the community and start contributing to their data collection.
The aim of Zooniverse projects is to convert the public’s effort into open-source datasets and compile results eligible to be published in scientific research papers. In fact, the data collected from various Zooniverse projects has yielded more than 100 scientific papers. For further reading on research conducted with Zooniverse data, have a look at the articles below.

Further reading: 
iNaturalist webpage 
eBird webpage
Zooniverse webpage
Global Biodiversity Information Facility

iNaturalist

Heberling, J. M. and Isaac, B. L. (2018) ‘iNaturalist as a tool to expand the research value of museum specimens’, Applications in Plant Sciences, 6(11), pp. 1–8. doi: 10.1002/aps3.1193.

Mueller, M. A., Drake, D. and Allen, M. L. (2019) ‘Using citizen science to inform urban canid management’, Landscape and Urban Planning. Elsevier, 189, pp. 362–371. doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.04.023.

Nugent, B. Y. J. (2018) ‘Citizen science for 21st-century naturalists’, Science Scope, pp. 12–14.

Ocampo-Peñuela, N. et al. (2016) ‘Patterns of bird-window collisions inform mitigation on a university campus’, PeerJ, pp. 2–16. doi: 10.7717/peerj.1652.

Vendetti, J. E. et al. (2018) ‘The introduced terrestrial slugs Ambigolimax nyctelius (Bourguignat, 1861) and Ambigolimax valentianus (Férussac, 1821) (Gastropoda: Limacidae) in California, with a discussion of taxonomy, systematics, and discovery by citizen science’, Journal of Natural History, 53, pp. 1607–1632. doi: 10.1080/00222933.2018.1536230.

Young, B. E. et al. (2019) ‘Using citizen science data to support conservation in environmental regulatory contexts’, Biological Conservation. Elsevier, 237, pp. 57–62. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.06.016.

eBird

Callaghan, C. T. et al. (2019) ‘Optimizing future biodiversity sampling by citizen scientists’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286, pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2019.1487.

Kain, M. P. and Bolker, B. M. (2019) ‘Predicting West Nile virus transmission in North American bird communities using phylogenetic mixed effects models and eBird citizen science data’, Parasites & Vectors. BioMed Central, 12(395), pp. 1–22. doi: 10.1186/s13071-019-3656-8.

La Sorte, F. A. and Somveille, M. (2019) ‘Survey completeness of a global citizen-science database of bird occurrence’, Ecography, 42, pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1111/ecog.04632.

Sullivan, B. L. et al. (2014) ‘The eBird enterprise: An integrated approach to development and application of citizen science’, Biological Conservation. Elsevier Ltd, 169, pp. 31–40. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2013.11.003.

Zooniverse
Raddick, M. J., Prather, E. E. and Wallace, C. S. (2019) ‘Galaxy zoo: Science content knowledge of citizen scientists’, Public Understanding of Science, 28(6), pp. 1–16. doi: 10.1177/0963662519840222.

Torney, C. J. et al. (2019) ‘A comparison of deep learning and citizen science techniques for counting wildlife in aerial survey images’, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 10(6), pp. 779–787. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.13165.

Willi, M. et al. (2019) ‘Identifying animal species in camera trap images using deep learning and citizen science’, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 10(1), pp. 80–91. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.13099.