ArticleEcology and evolution2021
Is color data from citizen science photographs reliable for biodiversity research?
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Untangling Colour Diversity: Ecogeographic Patterns in TwoEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Pacific Northwest native plants and native cultivars part II: plant and pollinator traits.Environmental entomology · 2025Article
- Delayed flowering phenology of red-flowering plants in response to hummingbird migration.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Photoregulatory functions drive variation in eye coloration across macaque species.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Preliminary evidence that eye appearance in parrots (Psittaciformes) co-varies with latitude and altitude.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Environmental colour pattern variation in Mediterranean Podarcis.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Predator selection on phenotypic variability of cryptic and aposematic moths.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evolutionary predictors of the specific colors of birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Scleral appearance is not a correlate of domestication in mammals.Zoological letters · 2023Article
- Temporal stability of the hybrid zone betweenEcology and evolution · 2023Article
- Colour scales with climate in North American ratsnakes: a test of the thermal melanism hypothesis using community science images.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Ecological factors are likely drivers of eye shape and colour pattern variations across anthropoid primates.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Is color data from citizen science photographs reliable for biodiversity research?Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- A pipeline for the rapid collection of color data from photographs.Applications in plant sciencesArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Color research continuously demands better methods and larger sample sizes. Citizen science (CS) projects are producing an ever-growing geo- and time-referenced set of photographs of organisms. These datasets have the potential to make a huge contribution to color research, but the reliability of these data need to be tested before widespread implementation.We compared the difference between color extracted from CS photographs with that of color extracted from controlled lighting conditions (i.e., the current gold standard in spectrometry) for both birds and plants. First, we tested the ability of CS photographs to quantify interspecific variability by assessing > 9,000 CS photographs of 537 Australian bird species with controlled museum spectrometry data. Second, we tested the ability of CS photographs to quantify intraspecific variability by measuring petal color data for two plant species using seven methods/sources with varying levels of control.For interspecific questions, we found that by averaging out variability through a large sample size, CS photographs capture a large proportion of across species variation in plumage color within the visual part of the spectrum (
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