Geometric and Statistical Techniques for Modeling Ecological Data: A Comparison of Seasonality Patterns of Northern Californian Birds across eBird and iNaturalist | Cody Carroll, University of San Francisco

Citizen science platforms like iNaturalist and eBird support engaged communities of observers who produce large amounts of biodiversity data. However, the question of how to appropriately leverage data jointly across several platforms for ecological research remains largely understudied and non-standardized. In this talk, we explore a few statistical and geometric methods for modeling, comparing, and merging crowd sourced data, using the seasonality patterns of ~250 species of birds in Northern California as an illustrative case study.