Original title: Integrating images, sounds, citizen science and AI to assess the biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest of Brazil
Researchers spent six years recording plants, animals and fungi in one area of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. They used phones and several kinds of cameras, then drew on apps such as iNaturalist and Merlin to help identify what they found. They recorded 492 species across many groups, including threatened and Brazil-endemic speciesA species that naturally occurs in a particular place and nowhere else.. The project also provides a beginner’s guide to using this approach on small properties.
Imagine keeping track of everything growing and moving around a large garden over several years. Some creatures are easy to spot, while others appear only at night or are too small to identify at a glance. In this paper, the garden is a patch of Atlantic Forest, the different ways of looking are the cameras and phones, and the shared record is the list of species people could identify together.
The Atlantic Forest has only 15% of its area remaining, yet much of its living community is still poorly known. This work shows how people on small properties can document local species with phones, cameras and citizen-science tools, giving conservation efforts more information to work with.
The abstract reports a survey of one Atlantic Forest area in southeast Brazil, so it does not establish the full biodiversity of the biome or show that the same species totals apply elsewhere. It describes the approach as feasible but does not report a comparison with other survey methods or measure whether citizen engagement or conservation outcomes changed.
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Integrating images, sounds, citizen science and AI to assess the biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest of Brazil — Manoel Luís Costa, Cláudia Mermelstein — PLoS ONE — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0360070
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.