Using Citizen Science to Document Biodiversity on a University Campus: A Year-Long Case Study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Citizen science is a rapidly growing field, particularly among young scientists. In this case study, we review a year-long citizen science initiative hosted at Western University, Canada, which aimed to document and highlight biodiversity on campus while simultaneously seeking to improve community engagement with the environment. Using the popular citizen science platform iNaturalist, we facilitated data collection and community engagement through a combination of informal field surveys, undergraduate-level course assignments, social media, and passive data submission. Throughout the first year of the initiative, nearly 300 community members submitted 3716 observations of 1225 species, including observations of 103 species documented on iNaturalist for the first time in the region, and other species of ecological significance. This citizen science project underscores the strengths and utility of citizen science and provides a framework for other higher education institutions to develop similar initiatives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it