Flipping the Script on Community Science Data: Learning about the Data Collectors On the Way to Learning about Ecology

As many ecological questions require hard-won data, and resource constraints require ecologists to do more with less, there have been continued debates about whether opportunistically collected data can provide trustworthy information about ecological properties like species prevalence and abundance. Even though opportunistically collected data cannot *replace* systematically collected data for estimating particular quantities of interest, it can *augment* it and shed light on new quantities of interest, this time about the observers themselves. In this talk I will discuss a comparison of data collected through two different community science data platforms, eBird and iNaturalist, and show what the observed differences reveal about both birds and birders.