Citizen Scientists can see the wood for the trees
Few countries have a biodiversity that’s comparable to Brazil’s, including plant-based food sources that are little known elsewhere. Even in big cities you may pick all kinds of fruit directly from the tree, which can be both tasty and also interesting for the botanist. The Citizen Science project “Pomar Urbano” collects data on urban fruit-bearing plant in Brazilian cities. First results have now been published in GigaByte.
In addition to the obvious benefit of having free food growing in your local park, fruit-bearing plants in the middle of the city also “promote human health and well-being by fostering a connection with nature”, as the new GigaByte paper notes. The authors, Filipi Miranda Soares and co-workers, decided to learn more about these urban biodiversity treasures. And they involved the local population of city dwellers in exploring them: Using the iNaturalist platform, they initiated a Citizen Science project called “Pomar Urbano” (meaning “urban orchard”) to collect observations of fruit-bearing plants in all major Brazilian cities. Also don’t miss their commentary in GigaScience, talking about their experience in using the iNaturalist platform for Citizen Science.
In their GigaByte data release they present the first results of this project in English and Portuguese (read more about our multi-lingual articles here). The data include, firstly, an expert-curated list of 429 fruit bearing plant species found in Brazil, both native and introduced. The second data set presents around 11.000 observations of these species from 27 major Brazilian cities, collected by citizen scientists in the iNaturalist app.
The urban top ten: native and introduced plants
Plants frequently observed in Brazilian cities include native species such as the Pekea Nut, Caryocar brasiliense, which is also the species with the highest number of observations in the capital Brasilia. However, the authors also note interesting differences between cities: In contrast to the capital Brasilia, which is characterized by the presence of many local species, in São Paulo for example only four of the “top ten” observations are native; frequent observations in São Paulo include many introduced plants such as loquat, which is native to Asia (by the way, a chromosome-scale genome assembly of loquat has been published in GigaScience).
The “top ten” iNaturalist observations of fruit bearing plants in the capital Brasilia. (via https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pomar-de-brasilia. )
Central to the success of this biodiversity project is the iNaturalist platform. Via the app, users of all walks of life – no taxonomic knowledge required! – can easily upload their nature observations. Usually an observation is a photo (but it can also be a voice recording of a birds, for example), together with metadata including date and location of the sighting. The AI identification model built into the app helps, but importantly, the preliminary identification is verified by the community of experts among iNaturalist users. The verified (“Research Grade”) data from the platform are also shared with a global collection of biodiversity data maintained by GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), making the data accessible to biodiversity researchers. (Also see our collaboration with GBIF for the Vectors of Human Disease series, and read the blog post here ).
Taioba tortelli and jaboticaba jam
Thus, iNaturalist not only helps to identify species for your own pleasure, but links public observations, expert identifiers and the scientific community. As the authors explain in the GigaByte paper and their accompanying GigaScience commentary, the data collected by citizen scientists has great re-use potential. Beyond the obvious benefit of mapping the biodiversity of fruit bearing plants, collaborating with citizens also builds connections between scientists and wider society; even inspiring food recipes based on fruit from “urban orchards”, including delicacies such as “taioba tortelli” based on Xanthosoma taioba or “jaboticaba jam”, made from Plinia peruviana.
Design inspired by Pomar Urbano. (From Fig. 6 in Soares et al.)
Even the creative industry got on board: A group of Fashion Design students at Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo created a porcelain cup featuring the Night Blooming Cactus flower (Epiphyllum oxypetalum) and Luciana Mendonça, a student of Interior Design, made a tablecloth print inspired by the flower of the guava tree, Psidium guajava.
And in the science department, the citizen-collected data can be used for machine learning applications that deal with recognizing fruit from images.
Mobilizing biodiversity data with GigaByte
At GigaScience Press, we are keen supporters of community projects – remember for example our crowdfunded Bauhinia project to sequence Hong Kong’s emblematic species or the publication of the crowd-funded genome of the Puerto Rican parrot Amazona vittata. With our innovative GigaByte journal and our associated database GigaDB we are making it easier to share and mobilize the results of Citizen Science such as Pomar Urbano. For a GigaByte paper to be publishable, the project doesn’t need to yield “final answers” to scientific questions, which is often beyond the scope of a data collection with citizens. And our option for multi-lingual articles helps to make the scientific output accessible to the local community.
Learn more about our efforts to mobilize biodiversity data, and how they are in line with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, by watching this presentation of our Editor-in-Chief Scott Edmunds:
References:
Filipi Miranda Soares, Luís Ferreira Pires, Maria Carolina Garcia, Lidio Coradin, Natalia Pirani Ghilardi-Lopes, Rubens Rangel Silva et al.: Citizen science data on urban forageable plants: a case study in Brazil, Gigabyte, 2024 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.107
Filipi Miranda Soares, Luís Ferreira Pires, Maria Carolina Garcia, Lidio Coradin, Natalia Pirani Ghilardi-Lopes, Rubens Rangel Silva et al.: Leveraging citizen science for monitoring urban forageable plants GigaScience giae007, https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giae007
Filipi Miranda Soares, Luís Ferreira Pires, Maria Carolina Garcia, Lidio Coradin, Natalia Pirani Ghilardi-Lopes, Rubens Rangel Silva et al.: Supporting data for “Citizen Science Data on Urban Forageable Plants: A Case Study in Brazil” GigaScience Database, 2024 http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/102499
Vectors of Human Disease (GigaByte thematic series) https://doi.org/10.46471/GIGABYTE_SERIES_0002
O’Brien SJ. Genome empowerment for the Puerto Rican parrot – Amazona vittata. GigaScience. 2012;1(1):13. https://doi.org/10.1186/2047-217X-1-13
Corey T. Callaghan ,Thomas Mesaglio ,John S. Ascher,Thomas M. Brooks,Analyn A. Cabras,Mark Chandler et al. The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier PLOS Biology https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001843
Shuang Jiang, Haishan An, Fangjie Xu, Xueying Zhang, Chromosome-level genome assembly and annotation of the loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) genome, GigaScience giaa015, https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giaa015
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science https://doi.org/10.54677/MNMH8546
