Abstract

This position paper discusses the potential of harnessing human computation via social networking technologies for citizen science and biodiversity monitoring. In
particular, the potential usefulness of exploiting small applications installed on social networking websites, such as Facebook, for delivering remotely captured imagery of
birds is discussed. A short review of previous relevant work in the areas of technology-assisted citizen science for bird monitoring applications, autonomous systems for bird detection and classification, human computation and games with a purpose (GWAPs), and social networking sites and their support of social games is given. It is then hypothesized that social networking sites like Facebook can be used to recruit, motivate, and mobilize large numbers of volunteers for citizen science applications and thereby facilitate a meaningful impact in a scientific discipline such as conservation biology and a list of research questions is presented. Finally some preliminary work is described and the route to further investigation is discussed.