Citizen scientists as butterfly predators: using foraging theory to understand individual recorder behaviour

Mingrui Li, Robin J. Boyd, Chloë Smith, Richard Fox, David Roy, Jonathan Bennie and Richard H. ffrench-Constant

Ecological Modelling, 2025, vol. 510, issue C

Abstract: Citizen science is increasingly important in the collection of biological data. However, to understand the broader utility of the growing number of citizen-derived records, we need to understand exactly how recorder behaviour affects the geographic distribution of records made. Here, we apply an optimal foraging model to citizen science data from the UK to determine how likely a recorder (predator) is to visit any given kilometre square and record a butterfly (prey). By defining the square with the highest density of an individual’s records as their ‘origin’, we show that the probability of visiting a given site depends on its distance from the origin and the rarity-weighted species richness of the species thought to be present. This pattern of behaviour differs between recorders visiting more than or fewer than five squares, termed broad and narrow-range foragers. The model shows that recorder behaviour is driven, in part, by a simple trade-off between distance travelled and the rarity-weighted species richness. This collective behaviour helps explain over-recording by broad-ranging foragers in protected areas at distance and under-recording, by narrow-range foragers, in the wider countryside. It also implies that estimating parameters describing rare species’ distributions (e.g. mean occupancy) will be challenging, since sample inclusion depends on occupancy itself. Mapping rare species’ distributions should be simpler, since the sites at which they can be found tend to be well-sampled, but the same is unlikely to be true of common species, which also occupy areas that are unlikely to be sampled. More work is needed to understand how widely our results can be generalised beyond the UK and the dataset considered.

Keywords: Citizen science; Butterfly monitoring; iRecord; Sampling bias; Optimal foraging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380025003308
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:510:y:2025:i:c:s0304380025003308

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2025.111344

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().