iNaturalists and EntoNaturalists: A comparison of Lepidoptera biodiversity records in Oklahoma

As citizen science projects and databases become more popular, they are increasingly used by researchers to understand the range and abundance of species as well as to characterize the diversity of species in an area.  Citizen science relies on members of the public, who submit sightings, photographs, or other occurrence data, which then gets vetted and made available to researchers.  While citizen science data has frequent inaccuracies and has many biases associated with organism detectability and identifiability, the quantity of data available makes it a very useful tool.   Over the past three years, we have conducted extensive surveys of butterflies in eastern Oklahoma, both at Camp Gruber National Guard Training Facility and at State Wildlife Management Areas.  We compare our results with observations posted to iNaturalist from the same region of Oklahoma.  We anticipate that large, showy species such as monarchs, Danaus plexippus, swallowtails, family Papilionidae, and greater fritillaries, genus Speyeria, will be overrepresented on iNaturalist compared to our survey data.  We also anticipate that our surveys will have a higher proportion of species that are easily overlooked or challenging to identify, such as many of the small, brown skippers, in the family Hesperiidae.  Being able to determine and quantify what biases are present in citizen science data for a popular group can enable us to better use similar data sources when examining insect diversity.