Statistics for citizen science: extracting signals of change from noisy ecological data

Summary Policy‐makers increasingly demand robust measures of biodiversity change over short time periods. Long‐term monitoring schemes provide high‐quality data, often on an annual basis, but are taxonomically and geographically restricted. By contrast, opportunistic biological records are relatively unstructured but vast in quantity. Recently, these data have been applied to increasingly elaborate science and policy questions, using a range of methods. At present, we lack a firm understanding of which methods, if any, are capable of delivering unbiased trend estimates on policy‐relevant time‐scales. We identified a set of candidate methods that employ data filtering criteria and/or correction factors to deal…

• NE
  Natural Environment Research Council