Citizen science detected Marmorkrebs

I’d read a lot of news articles in late October about the discovery of Marmorkrebs in Brussels. Ariana Remmel managed to add an important detail I hadn’t seen before: that the Marmorkrebs were spotted as the result of citizen science.

A research team led by Kevin Scheers... first realized there might be a problem when he saw a marbled crayfish photo misidentified on a citizen science website called Waarnemingen.be.

The site is a local iteration of Observations.org, a website for recording observations of species in nature.

This is important, because as Marmorkrebs becomes more and more widespread, I am deeply worried researchers will lose interest in documenting where they are. Good monitoring is important to management and without it, the spread of Marmorkrebs – already difficult to detect – will be even harder.

External links

Turkey troubles and cantankerous crustaceans