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Note: Session titles beginning with an asterisk (*) have student presenters.
AUTHORS: Laura Dugan, Texas Natural Diversity Database, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department; Michelle Haggerty, Master Naturalist Program and Texas Nature Trackers, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department; Richard Heilbrun, Conservation Outreach Program, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department; Marsha May, Texas Nature Trackers, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department
ABSTRACT: Citizen science can produce large amounts of data at a much faster rate than conventional data collection methods; however, certain issues—such as species misidentification, spatial data precision, and lack of associated attribute data—need to be considered before putting these data to work for conservation action. Here, we present an example of harnessing a large citizen science dataset and incorporating it into a database used by a variety of parties for diverse conservation actions. The Texas Nature Trackers Herps of Texas iNaturalist Project is a citizen science project aimed at documenting the presence of amphibians and reptiles in Texas with a priority on certain target Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN). To deal with the issue of misidentification, observations added to the project were curated by expert herpetologists and then filtered by taxonomy, accuracy, and other factors to produce a dataset of SGCN observations considered Texas Natural Diversity Database (TXNDD)-grade. These records were subsequently entered into the TXNDD resulting in 1,882 new features including two of chicken turtle (Deirochelys reticularia miaria) and eight of the state threatened Chihuahuan Desert lyre snake (Trimorphodon vilkinsonii), both previously unrepresented in the database. TXNDD data are utilized by a range of clients and conservation partners for a variety of conservation actions including conducting environmental review and species assessments, determining monitoring and funding priorities and state listing statuses, and informing global conservation ranks. The outcome of this process as well as lessons learned related to project setup, data preparation, and processing will be discussed.
Tuesday October 31, 2017 9:15am - 9:30am EDT
McCreary