Michael Moore

Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow, Living Earth Collaborative

What were your research plans for the summer, before COVID-19?

“I would not have been in St. Louis. I would have been catching dragonflies in different parts of the country, looking at genetic differences across the continent. Instead, I’m using citizen science data to look at how the different dragonfly species have shifted in their ornamental traits across North America.”

In a recent Tyson seminar, you talked about the use of citizen science data. What do you think is the importance of collaboration between scientists and the general public and do you think it will become more common in the future?

“I think it will be more common and I certainly hope that it is. The exciting thing about using citizen science data sets like iNaturalist or eBird or GBIF is that they offer mountains, literally a trove, of data to be used for the right questions. Perhaps the images that are uploaded to something like iNaturalist aren't as good as if I was out there catching these animals and taking really standardized pictures. But in most situations, the observations are perfectly good for answering a wide variety of questions and you can get answers on a much greater scale than you would if it was just me and a small team.

So let me give you an example. This past summer, I was going to document how different dragonfly traits vary across the continent. I would have caught a bunch of dragonflies. I would have taken tissue samples so that we could measure differences in their underlying genes. And I would also have taken really nice, standardized pictures. I have a lot of experience catching dragonflies and taking pictures of them. For me over the course of one summer, I could have maybe sampled a few hundred dragonflies, maybe a thousand at most and that would have just been one species. With some of the iNaturalist projects that I've been working on, with some of the great observations taken by the citizen scientists, we were in one case actually able to look at some of these patterns in 10 different species.

This kind of data certainly isn't perfect for everything, but it's absolutely a way that we can look at broad geographic patterns and where organisms live. And, as more people upload observations on platforms like iNaturalist, we will have a living record of real-time changes in biodiversity patterns. Obviously none of us want the environment to change. But purely from an academic standpoint, it's really every evolutionary biologist's dream to have this documented record of how these traits might change over the next few decades as the environment is changing.”

Michael studies the adaptation and diversification of life histories and mating systems. Learn more about his dragonfly phenotypic evolution research here.