Occurrence records of spiders mobilized through SpiderIndia citizen science initiative on Facebook

Study Extent

Occurrence records from Facebook group SpiderIndia (https://facebook.com/groups/SpiderIndia/) were extracted and compiled into tabular data by parsing the unstructured data into standardized Darwin Core format.

Sampling

The digital images with associated metadata contributed by citizens on social media websites were used to create a workflow. Observational data was organized in a tabular form and in standardized format and furnished through a search algorithm tailored to detected taxon names. Taxon names were provided using the World Spider Catalog Database publicly available at https://wsc.nmbe.ch/. This data was manually curated by the hired interns and validated by the data experts to be qualified as research grade data.

Method steps

1. Data was mobilized from the SpiderIndia community on Facebook. A total of 20,000 observations spanning between the years 2011 and 2021 were extracted of which about 15,000 observations were filtered through the curation and validation process. The founder and moderator of this project facilitated the extraction of this existing data through Facebook. A team of developers from the IBP developed the workflow to extract the data into tabular format on the portal for curation and uploaded as a data table on IBP. A taxonomic expert enhanced this data by identifying, annotating and validating observations.

1. Araneae
   common name: Spiders rank: order

This dataset compiles occurrence records from all over India.