Can Street View technology enhance the reliability of distribution data for monitoring invasive species?

Sammanfattning

Many municipalities around Sweden use public access spatial data from Artportalen to track and fight invasive species, but anyone can upload data to Artportalen and not all of it becomes verified. They could potentially enhance their efforts by incorporating street view technology for more reliable data. One municipality that uses Artportalen data is Jönköping, which suffers from Reynoutria japonica. I randomly selected 50 areas around Jönköping with reports of R. japonica and went through them using Street View. The purpose of this study is to test if Street View can be used to improve the reliability of Artportalen data and if it can fully replace other methods to do so. I counted each individual of R. japonica I could identify and compared it to the number of reports in each area. Among the 50 areas only 26 were reachable in Google Street View and some plants were impossible to identify if they were R. japonica or not. When looking at the areas that could be reached it showed no difference between Reports in Artportalen and what was found in Street View if you included the unidentifiable plants. When excluding unidentified plants or when including areas that could not be reached it showed a significant difference. Using Google Street View to complement Artportalen data for R. japonica comes with benefits and limitations. Many areas were impossible to reach, but where accessible, it proved effective in identifying misreports and finding unreported plants without the need to visit the location. Street View data can enhance the reliability of distribution data used for monitoring invasive species without ever needing to travel, however it cannot fully replace other methods of enhancement and for the best reliability, a combination of Street View and on-site visits is necessary.