Abundant Citizen Science Data Reveal That the Peacock Butterfly Aglais io Recently Became Bivoltine in Belgium.

The peacock butterfly is abundant and widespread in Europe. It is generally believed to be univoltine (one generation per year): adults born in summer overwinter and reappear again in spring to reproduce. However, recent flight patterns in western Europe mostly show three peaks during the year: a first one in spring (overwintering butterflies), a second one in early summer (offspring of the spring generation), and a third one in autumn. It was thus far unclear whether this autumn flight peak was a second new generation or consisted of butterflies flying again in autumn after a summer rest (aestivation). The life cycle of one of Europe's most common butterflies is therefore still surprisingly inadequately understood. We used hundreds of thousands of observations and thousands of pictures submitted by naturalists from the public to the online portal observation.orgin Belgium and analyzed relations between flight patterns, condition (wear), reproductive cycles, peak abundances, and phenology to clarify the current life history. We demonstrate that peacocks have shifted towards two new generations per year in recent decades. Mass citizen science data in online portals has become increasingly important in tracking the response of biodiversity to rapid environmental changes such as climate change.

Waarnemingen.be - Plant occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium.

Waarnemingen.be - Plant occurrences in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region, Belgium is a species occurrence dataset published by Natuurpunt. The dataset contains almost 1.2 million plant occurrences of 1,222 native vascular plant species, mostly recorded by volunteers (citizen scientists), mainly since 2008. The occurrences are derived from the database http://www.waarnemingen.be, hosted by Stichting Natuurinformatie and managed by the nature conservation NGO Natuurpunt. Together with the datasets Florabank1 (Van Landuyt and Brosens 2017) and the Belgian IFBL (Instituut voor Floristiek van België en Luxemburg) Flora Checklists (Van Landuyt and Noé 2015), the dataset represents the most complete overview of indigenous plants in Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region.

A novel method to reduce time investment when processing videos from camera trap studies.

Camera traps have proven very useful in ecological, conservation and behavioral research. Camera traps non-invasively record presence and behavior of animals in their natural environment. Since the introduction of digital cameras, large amounts of data can be stored. Unfortunately, processing protocols did not evolve as fast as the technical capabilities of the cameras. We used camera traps to record videos of Eurasian beavers (Castor fiber). However, a large number of recordings did not contain the target species, but instead empty recordings or other species (together non-target recordings), making the removal of these recordings unacceptably time consuming. In this paper we propose a method to partially eliminate non-target recordings without having to watch the recordings, in order to reduce workload. Discrimination between recordings of target species and non-target recordings was based on detecting variation (changes in pixel values from frame to frame) in the recordings. Because of the size of the target species, we supposed that recordings with the target species contain on average much more movements than non-target recordings. Two different filter methods were tested and compared. We show that a partial discrimination can be made between target and non-target recordings based on variation in pixel values and that environmental conditions and filter methods influence the amount of non-target recordings that can be identified and discarded. By allowing a loss of 5% to 20% of recordings containing the target species, in ideal circumstances, 53% to 76% of non-target recordings can be identified and discarded. We conclude that adding an extra processing step in the camera trap protocol can result in large time savings. Since we are convinced that the use of camera traps will become increasingly important in the future, this filter method can benefit many researchers, using it in different contexts across the globe, on both videos and photographs.