Accuracy of odonate phenology and distribution data between two different sources

In a changing world, conservation efforts rely on a thorough understanding of phenology and range trends for a given species. Odonates (dragonflies and damselflies) have become popular study organisms for insect-based climate studies, partly because of extensive links between their life history and their environmental conditions, and party because their charismatic appearance has resulted in a large citizen scientist following. While formal scientific records of this taxa may be limited, citizen science efforts have provided nearly 200,000 open-sourced odonate records through public databases like Odonata Central and iNaturalist. This hobbyist participation offers unprecedented coverage over time and space, making dynamic monitoring more feasible. Likewise, these records could conceivably be used to study how species ranges and phenologies have changed over time. While citizen science databases, like iNaturalist, can be quite extensive, concerns regarding the accuracy and thoroughness of these public endeavors have arisen. Certain anomalies in the public data, most noticeably a large data gap centered around the central Appalachians, imply that public datasets may be misrepresentative of the ‘true’ presence in that area. To test the accuracy and representativeness of these citizen endeavors, we did extensive ground-truthing across four states in the 2019 summer season. Our results found that ground-truthed records were not always consistent with Odonate patterns recorded in citizen science databases, suggesting these databases may not always capture representative biological trends and raising further questions about the observed data gaps.