MEE: Measuring relative data quality

Art Munson, Cornell University, USA, talks with Graziella Iossa about his work with colleagues in developing a method for measuring the relative information content of data from different monitoring protocols. Art presents a method to compare the information from two data sources. As often in ecology data are difficult to compare because they have been collected at different points in space and time, Art and colleagues propose using a model that summarises each of these data sources and allowing a direct comparison of the data. Their work advances methodology in ecology and evolution in two ways. At first they were analysing a citizen science project, the eBird dataset, which collects bird observations throughout the western hemisphere and there was a question of how much the biological information was being collected by this citizen science project. One outcome of their work found that eBird is collecting a lot of useful information. More generally, this method can be applied to verify data sources for lots of different purposes. Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00035.x/full