---
title: 'Culling Seagull Records: Using R to Curate Community Science Checklists'
pretalx_url: https://pretalx.seagl.org/2024/talk/7QPK9S/
beginning: '2024-11-09T13:30:00-08:00'
end: '2024-11-09T13:50:00-08:00'
presenters:
- name: Richard Littauer
  pretalx_url: https://pretalx.seagl.org/2024/speaker/ERC3BF/
  biography: Richard Littauer is an organizer of SustainOSS and CURIOSS, the Interim
    Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and a PhD student at Te Herenga Waka
    Victoria University of Wellington. As a full-stack developer and open source community
    consultant, he has interfaced with thousands of different projects in dozens of
    communities. He likes birds.
---

I am a reviewer for eBird, one of the largest community scientist platforms in the world, where people submit checklists of birds they saw. Reviewers go over these records, looking for aberrant observations, incorrectly tagged media, and records which need just a little bit more detail. With around 100 million checklists to review, this task can take a lot of time! In this talk, I'll go over this process, and talk about how I and a few other reviewers use open source tooling written in R to make this process a bit easier.
