Species Identification in Citizen Science: Effects of Interface Design and Image Difficulty on User Performance and Workload.

Species identification is an important scientific activity for ecological monitoring and digital technology has enabled citizen science projects to recruit volunteers for collecting and processing species information. Experts can easily identify species due to their formal knowledge and experience but volunteers require identification tools, which can help them to filter out the relevant species. Filtering of species is an important design element for such tools and we have identified two relevant techniques i.e. feature selection and decision tree for this purpose. We prototyped interfaces based on these techniques and conducted a user study where participants performed species identification tasks.