Community Science

Using citizen/community science (CS) data to study outdoor recreation and visitation on public lands: an eBird example

Some outdoor recreation activities are regulated and require participants to have a permit or license (e.g., hunting and fishing). However, wildlife watching—and especially birdwatching—is a non-consumptive activity that requires no permit or license and thus leaves few formal data trails. Crowd-sourced data with associated volunteered geographic information, gathered by a variety of citizen/community science projects and social media platforms, can complement the information about non-consumptive activities provided by standard administrative datasets.

The non-market value of birding sites and the marginal value of additional species: Biodiversity in a random utility model of site choice by eBird members

Members of Cornell University's eBird project report bird sitings at geo-coded destinations. With origin information, we can infer the value to this group of biodiversity in bird species by observing how much more in travel costs they are willing to incur to gain opportunities to see more diverse populations of birds.