A review of invasive species reporting apps for citizen science and opportunities for innovation

作者：Leif Howard, Charles B. van Rees, Zoe Dahlquist, Gordon Luikart, Brian K. Hand · 发表于：NeoBiota · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3897/neobiota.71.79597 · 被引用次数：83 · 研究领域：Species Distribution and Climate Change、Animal and Plant Science Education、Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior

Smartphone apps have enhanced the potential for monitoring of invasive alien species (IAS) through citizen science. They now have the capacity to massively increase the volume and spatiotemporal coverage of IAS occurrence data accrued in centralised databases. While more reporting apps are developed each year, innovation across diverse functionalities and data management in this field are occurring separately and simultaneously amongst numerous research groups with little attention to trends, priorities and opportunities for improvement. This creates the risk of duplication of effort and missed opportunities for implementing new and existing functionalities that would directly benefit IAS research and management. Using a literature search of Early Detection and Rapid Response implementation, smartphone app development and invasive species reporting apps, we developed a rubric for quantitatively assessing the functionality of IAS reporting apps and applied this rubric to 41 free, English-language IAS reporting apps, available via major mobile app stores in North America. The five highest performing apps achieved scores of 61.90% to 66.35% relative to a hypothetical maximum score, indicating that many app features and functionalities, acknowledged to be useful for IAS reporting in literature, are not present in sampled apps. This suggests that current IAS reporting apps do not make use of all available and known functionalities that could maximise their efficacy. Major implemen...