Oral Paper
Reproductive Processes
Combining citizen science and field survey approaches to study floral color variation across a species' geographic range
Presenting Author
Shu-Mei Chang
Description
Coloration of the floral organs, including petal, anthers, and stigam, is an ecologically important trait and uncovering color variation over a geographic range, particularly in species with large distributions and/or short bloom times, requires extensive fieldwork that can sometime fall short on collecting a thorough coverage of the entire range. Using a recently developed method, we supplemented the field survey data by including images from citizen science repositories such as iNaturliast. Using a recently developed automated method, we characterize a large dataset of photographs from across the distribution range of the wild geranium, Geranium maculatum, to enhance our survey of floral color variation from the entire geographic range of this species. We analyze the color data against Bioclim data to determine whether trait variation is associated with any abiotic environmental factors. Our results showed that pigmentation of G. maculatum is correlated with precipitation, annual mean temperature, and UV level. We discuss the added value and caveates of using citizen science data in this study.