Safari science: assessing the reliability of citizen science data for wildlife surveys

1. Protected areas are the cornerstone of global conservation, yet financial support for basic monitoring infrastructure is lacking in 60% of them. Citizen science holds potential to address these shortcomings in wildlife monitoring, particularly for resource-limited conservation initiatives in developing countries - if we can account for the reliability of data produced by volunteer citizen scientists (VCS) .
2. This study tests the reliability of VCS data vs. data produced by trained ecologists, presenting a hierarchical framework for integrating diverse datasets to assess extra variability from VCS data.
3. Our results show that, while VCS data are likely to be overdispersed for our system, the overdispersion varies widely by species. We contend that citizen science methods, within the context of East African drylands, may be more appropriate for species with large body sizes, which are relatively rare, or those that form small herds. VCS perceptions of the charisma of a species ma...