Network Analysis of the iNaturalist Citizen Science Community
Yu Lu Liu Thomas Jiralerspong
In recent years, citizen science has become a larger and larger part of the
scientific community. Its ability to crowd source data and expertise from
thousands of citizen scientists makes it invaluable. Despite the field's
growing popularity, the interactions and structure of citizen science projects
are still poorly understood and under analyzed. We use the iNaturalist citizen
science platform as a case study to analyze the structure of citizen science
projects. We frame the data from iNaturalist as a bipartite network and use
visualizations as well as established network science techniques to gain
insights into the structure and interactions between users in citizen science
projects. Finally, we propose a novel unique benchmark for network science
research by using the iNaturalist data to create a network which has an unusual
structure relative to other common benchmark networks. We demonstrate using a
link prediction task that this network can be used to gain novel insights into
a variety of network science methods.