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Assessing the communication of bias in UK monitoring schemes 2024

Abstract

The UK has a long history of volunteer-conducted biological monitoring, which now includes a number of national surveillance schemes that span multiple taxa. These have allowed long-term monitoring of population trends and species diversity, informing conservation policy and management. While large numbers of volunteers facilitate the collection of large quantities of data, the collection is, at least in part, opportunistic. This can result in biases, such as non-random sampling of sites, and changes in sampling effort over time. These biases can make it harder to conduct analyses and draw robust conclusions, as well as undermining the reliability and credibility of data collected by citizen scientists.

How monitoring schemes communicate this bias is therefore extremely important. Effective communication will foster confidence in scheme outputs, allow correct interpretation and further analysis of data, and will increase transparency around data limitations.

This review assessed 26 publicly available documents from six UK monitoring schemes to determine how effectively bias is being communicated. The biases were categorised as geographic, environmental, taxonomic or “other potential biases”, and assessed using the ROBITT Framework (Boyd et al. 2020).

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Resource type Publication

Topic category Environment

Reference date 2024·10·01

Citation
Eskuche-Keith, P. 2024. Assessing the communication of bias in UK monitoring schemes. JNCC Report 784, JNCC, Peterborough, ISSN 0963-8091.

Lineage
This review assessed how effectively bias is being communicated for several UK monitoring schemes.

Responsible organisation
Communications, JNCC publisher

Limitations on public access No limitations

Use constraints Available under the Open Government Licence 3.0

Metadata date 2024·11·12

Metadata point of contact
Communications, JNCC

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