OMEGA-LOCATE: A CITIZEN SCIENCE PROJECT FOR BIODIVERSITY AND PALAEOCLIMATE RESEARCH

Ostracoda are common components of aquatic communities and their fossil shells are widely utilised for palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic reconstructions. The Ostracod Metadatabase of Environmental and Geographical Attributes (OMEGA) integrates records from regional databases of extant species distributions, aimed at creating a global distributional dataset to facilitate the modelling of climate change effects on biodiversity and the calibration of taxa for palaeoclimate applications. Work is in progress to improve accuracy of geographic referencing and nomenclatorial congruence of c. 45,000 records from America and Eurasia. The OMEGA-LOCATE project aims to improve coverage and reduce locational errors by enlisting Citizen Scientists (CS) to help check, correct and validate the geographic referencing of species' records. The project operates under the aegis of the Training and Research Initiative in Citizen Science at Queen Mary University of London and is supported by BioFresh, a project aimed at building a global information platform with access to all available databases of freshwater biodiversity. CS request a geographical region from the project website and are supplied with an Excel spreadsheet containing coordinate and place name data for 50–100 localities, a Keyhole Markup Language file of the data to view in Google Earth and a pdf manual of instructions and contextual information. CS use Google Earth to check records are correctly located and adjust those that are not. A similar approach can be applied to the determination of coordinates for published records not yet entered in the database. On acceptance of a corrected dataset CS may request a second dataset to work on, and so on. The project coordinator organises workshops to inform CS about the context of the project and how their efforts contribute to science, as well as hands-on training providing opportunities to learn more about ostracods in general and their use in palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, aided by practical microscopy and Geographical Information System exercises. CS can be located anywhere in the world; they must be interested in science but they do not need specialist knowledge, although there is no reason to exclude those with some relevant training, such as school students and undergraduates.