ArticleScientific reports2021
The power of community science to quantify ecological interactions in cities.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey?Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Synthetic control methods enable stronger causal inference using participatory science data in cities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Effects of Urbanization on Ventral Patch Size and Phenotypic Correlates of Patch Expression in Male Western Fence Lizards (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Citizen science data on urban forageable plants: a case study in Brazil.GigaByte (Hong Kong, China) · 2024Article
- Temporal stability of the hybrid zone betweenEcology and evolution · 2023Article
- Citizen science provides valuable data to evaluate elasmobranch diversity and trends throughout the French Polynesia's shark sanctuary.PloS one · 2023Article
- Colour scales with climate in North American ratsnakes: a test of the thermal melanism hypothesis using community science images.Biology letters · 2022Article
- The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Review
- A comparison of herbarium and citizen science phenology datasets for detecting response of flowering time to climate change in Denmark.International journal of biometeorology · 2022Article
- Article
- How Do Young Community and Citizen Science Volunteers Support Scientific Research on Biodiversity? The Case of iNaturalist.Diversity · 2021Article
- Urban invaders are not bold risk-takers: a study of 3 invasive lizards in Southern California.Current zoology · 2020Article
- What can we learn from wildlife sightings during the COVID-19 global shutdown?Ecosphere (Washington, D.C) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studying animals in urban environments is especially challenging because much of the area is private property not easily accessible to professional scientists. In addition, collecting data on animals that are cryptic, secretive, or rare is also challenging due to the time and resources needed to amass an adequate dataset. Here, we show that community science can be a powerful tool to overcome these challenges. We used observations submitted to the community science platform iNaturalist to assess predation and parasitism across urbanization gradients in a secretive, 'hard-to-study' species, the Southern Alligator Lizard (Elgaria multicarinata). From photographs, we quantified predation risk by assessing tail injuries and quantified parasitism by counting tick loads on lizards. We found that tail injuries increased with age and with urbanization, suggesting that urban areas are risky habitats. Conversely, parasitism decreased with urbanization likely due to a loss of hosts and anti-tick medications used on human companion animals. This community science approach generated a large dataset on a secretive species rapidly and at an immense spatial scale that facilitated quantitative measures of urbanization (e.g. percent impervious surface cover) as opposed to qualitative measures (e.g. urban vs. rural). We therefore demonstrate that community science can help resolve ecological questions that otherwise would be difficult to address.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.