Biological inventory at a university campus using ICT and citizen science participation

ABSTRACT

The participation of citizens in science projects has been increasing over the past two decades and has proven to be of great importance for biological research, specially for obtaining essential biodiversity data. Citizen science participation can be greatly improved through information and communication technologies (ICT). Therefore, our aim is to gather information about the biodiversity present in the Limón campus of the UCR through a combination of literature review and the participation of local citizens. We identified species of flora and fauna present in the campus through photographs and videos of organisms received from students and personnel of the Limón campus of the University of Costa Rica. Such visual material was collected by using ICT. We analyzed a total of 889 contributions from which we identified 144 species of fungi, plants and animals. The most used ICT to share photographs and videos was the multimedia messaging service WhatsApp, and organisms that usually generate negative perceptions like insects and reptiles were the most recorded. We conclude that citizen participation using ICT is an effective way to collect information for biological inventories. Such information can then be used to carried out environmental education and promote a location as a tourist destination.

KEYWORDS:

• Biodiversity
• citizen science
• communication technologies
• Costa Rica
• ethnobotanical garden
• nature-based tourism
• university campus

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Yordy Soto, Ana Cristina Zúñiga and Alexander Chaves for their help to collect data and to two anonymous reviewers that helped to improve the manuscript. We are also grateful with students and personnel of the Sede del Caribe, UCR, that provided photographs and videos of organisms. Finally, we thank Luis Ricardo Murillo and Melissa Mardones for their help on species identification of insects and fungi respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Universidad de Costa Rica [project number 530-B7-719].