Digital technology has revolutionized the ways in which natural history observations are collected and shared. Public participation has been vastly expanded, and remarkable advances have been achieved for historically difficult questions regarding the distribution and abundance of wild organisms. At the same time, observers’ practices have been changing rapidly, for many reasons, both intended and unintended, with a wide range of consequences for data quality and usefulness. Shai Mitra, an evolutionary biologist, will critique several areas in which the relationships between methods and results have become confused, such as the selection of sampling sites, distance and duration of effort, completeness of samples, independence of samples, and treatment of taxa above and below the species level. Mitra will show that current practices—including some that have been strongly advocated—are yielding negative consequences for data quality and overall usefulness, and will propose several simple improvements.
