Analyzing your citizen science data

Making sense of your data

To better understand your biodiversity data collected, you can look at abundance, richness and diversity of the species encountered in your survey.

1. Abundance

Abundance refers to the number of living things, such as animals, plants, fungi, or any other group, that are present in a particular area. If you count 15 butterflies during your survey, then the abundance of butterflies in that garden at that point of time is 15.

2. Richness

Richness is about the number of different kinds of living things (species) in an area or habitat. If abundance tells us ”how many [individuals]”, richness tells us ”how many different species”. During your survey, if you see many species of butterflies, bees and dragonflies in the garden, the garden has high species richness. If you see only one or two species of butterfly, the garden has low species richness.

3. Diversity

In biodiversity studies, diversity is not only about how many different species there are in a habitat; it measures how balanced their populations are. Diversity takes into account both the number of species (richness) and the number of individuals of each species (abundance). A truly diverse ecosystem has many different species of relatively similar number of individuals – no one species is dominating the landscape.

Collating your findings

After your analysis, collate the findings and come up with a simple event report. Here’s what you can include in the report:

• Most common species

• Rarest or any notable species observed

• Total number of species observed

• Distribution of species observed

• Population Trends (if any)

You can even do further research and present your findings through posters! This will reinforce what you have learnt and you may even discover more about our native species.