Crowdsourced science is helping to predict the path of the deadly plant disease, demonstrating the contributions trained citizen scientists can make in large-scale geographic tracking projects.
That's the conclusion of a study of sudden oak death monitoring in California. The results are published in this month's issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Ebola of the plant world
"Sudden oak death is the Ebola of the plant world, the most serious threat to non-agricultural plants," says lead paper author Ross Meentemeyer, director of the Center for Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University.The disease, which has killed millions of oak and tanoak trees in California and Oregon, can infect up to 60 landscape plant species and spread from nursery stock to residential landscapes. Starting in 2008, University of California, Berkeley, researchers expanded their sudden oak death monitoring efforts exponentially, thanks to observations from 1,600 trained volunteers who collected leaf samples from trees in metropolitan and urban-wildland areas.
Citizen scientists often needed in research
"To answer many science questions, we need the efforts of a large number of people--and the general public can help," says Sam Scheiner, National Science Foundation (NSF) director for the NSF-NIH-USDA Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Program, which funded the research.
"This study shows that asking local residents to report on the locations of outbreaks of sudden oak death can provide critical information. The result is a better understanding of the spread of this serious plant disease."Adds Meentemeyer, "We were able to get data from backyards in the San Francisco Bay area, along with other locations."Those data were used to develop accurate computer models for the disease's spread, showing that properly trained and educated citizen scientists can collect data that's just as reliable as that of professionals."
Source:- nsf.gov.in