Crowdsourcing Meets Ecology: Hemispherewide Spatiotemporal Species Distribution Models

The processes that affect the distributions of animals and plants operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, presenting a unique challenge for the development and coordination of effective conservation strategies, particularly for wide-ranging species. In order to study ecological systems across scales, data must be collected at fine resolutions across broad spatial and temporal extents. Crowdsourcing has emerged as an efficient way to gather these data by engaging large numbers of people to record observations. However, data gathered by crowdsourced projects are often biased due to the opportunistic approach of data collection. In this article, we propose a general class of models called AdaSTEM (for adaptive spatiotemporal exploratory models) that are designed to meet these challenges by adapting to multiple scales while exploiting variation in data density common with crowdsourced data.