It might seem like social media sites are saturated with photos of donuts and ‘dogs who fail’. But millions of photos on social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Picasa are coming to the aid of biodiversity researchers. These photos are helping them track species in areas they are not able to access.

Over the past few years, citizen science has helped map a diverse range of species from bats to slender lorises to moths to invasive species. Vijay Barve, who has been part of various citizen science groups on butterflies and moths, studied how naturalists are sharing images. Barve wanted to see how these massive troves of biodiversity occurrence records could offer a rich new source of data.

“When I started on ecological niche modeling to understand how species are distributed, the impact of climate change and the growth of invasive species, I realized the paucity of data for India,” he said. “Government herbaria and other collections are not digitized at all.”

Having been involved with citizen science for 16 years, and seeing how much everyday enthusiasts and their documentation can contribute, Barve decided to harvest the photos available on social media sites in India. He started with medicinal plants, which he has been working to conserve since 1994 with help from the Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions in Bangalore.

“I tried to harvest info from Flickr and was surprised to find a lot and was able to produce maps of species of conservation concern,” he said. Maps apart, such data mining can also help with seasonality studies (photos with dates) and migration trends (photos with location data).

But more than the number of images, it is the quality and the accuracy of identification that matters, particularly for mapping a species. What helps is that people can access experts on social media and take their help in identifying the species. “For instance, swallowtail butterflies were 93% accurate,” said Barve. The data is useful to augment other research, especially for invertebrates – bees, dragonflies, beetles, butterflies.

When Barve and a few of his naturalist friends started out, they thought they wouldn't find more than 100-150 people in India who would be interested in documenting butterflies. Now the Yahoo e-group has more than 1,000 members, and Facebook has more 15,000.