What’s in a name? Crowdsourcing citizens, experts, and the Web to populate the ID Source plant pest identification search tool

Background/Question/Methods

Crowd-sourcing citizens to gather environmental information is now common practice. However, excitement in this area typically stems from the public’s interest in charismatic species and subjects. Plant pests and diseases continue to cause economic harm and impact local communities, yet effective control requires proper identification which requires easily discoverable, quality identification resources (ID Aids). We used this powerful new paradigm to leverage citizens, experts, and information online to compile the best available plant pest ID Aids. We developed the ID Source search tool (http://idsource.colostate.edu; a searchable gateway to help those in need of plant pest identification resources) as a way to crowd-source and iteratively improve the discovery, review, feedback, and rating of online plant pest ID Aids.

Results/Conclusions

The ID Source website and searchable database now contain over 1,600 Aids categorized by organism group, taxa covered, region, contents, commodity, key program used, and information type. As users enter search terms, ID Source logs terms and subsequently crawls ID Aid webpages for them or for instances where taxonomic synonyms or common names can be determined, thereby creating relationships between ID Aid content and terms for which users are most interested. ID Source has logged 1,968+ terms and created relationships between taxonomic serial numbers in the International Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) database for scientific names, ITIS common names, and user entered search terms. Thus far, we have amassed some 311,957 relationships between ID Aids and ITIS scientific names; 520,674 relationships with ITIS common names; and 229,241 relationships with user entered search terms. By initially populating the database with the  best available resources and expert web browser bookmarks, web-crawling these resources to generate value-added relationships between them and user-generated terms, and encouraging participation from users and experts alike to continually improve the database, we were able to create a centralized and vetted repository of quality identification resources.