iNaturalist and structured mammal surveys reflect similar species richness but capture different species pools across the United States

Abstract

Crowd-sourced biodiversity data, such as those housed in the iNaturalist platform, are increasingly used to monitor species distributions. Such data represent unstructured biodiversity surveys that are generally comprised of incidental observations and do not report variation in sampling effort. These discrepancies may yield data that is incongruent with data from structured surveys. To assess whether mammalian iNaturalist data are reflective of data from traditional structured surveys, we calculated and compared measures of mammalian species richness and species pool similarity using data from unstructured surveys (i.e., iNaturalist) and data from structured camera trap surveys and bat acoustic surveys. We found that data from structured and unstructured surveys generally document similar mammalian species richness, but the two survey types document different species pools. Human population density and proxies for species pool breadth were most strongly associated with discrepancies in datasets, with data being most similar in areas of high human population density and lower species richness. Our analyses revealed that dataset similarity varied across geography and community metric for most taxa, but that structured and unstructured surveys produced consistently unreconcilable datasets for bats. These findings suggest that unstructured datasets like iNaturalist may offer reliable data for some taxa and geographies, but that these data are not universally applicable to all research scenarios.

Citation

Herrera, Daniel J.; Schalk, Christopher M.; Jensen, Alex J.; Goldstein, Benjamin R.; Rooney, Brigit R.; Kays, Roland; McShea, William J.; Cove, Michael V. 2025. iNaturalist and structured mammal surveys reflect similar species richness but capture different species pools across the United States. Ecology and Evolution. 15: e71805. 11 p. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.71805