Social networking for biodiversity: The BeeID project

Social network sites can provide useful resources for scientific research, especially in engaging citizen scientists in research. However, much citizen science work in biodiversity can be inaccurate due to poor identification and misreporting of information. Here we present an outline of a method that uses the photo-sharing website Flickr for mapping the distribution of bees throughout the UK. Users upload photographs to the website and identification of the photographs is conducted by trained volunteers. Use of GPS equipped mobile telephones helps with the recording of location information and the use of trained volunteers identifying bees from photographs helps eliminate problems of misidentification. This is in addition to the power of social network sites to generate interest and participation in the project.