Botanists have discovered six new species of carnivorous sundew plants in Western Australia through photos shared on social media. In recent years, researchers have identified numerous new species through photos shared by individuals on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Botanists from the Botanical State Collection in Munich and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich have now identified additional carnivorous plants using social media. According to a publication in the Biology journal, the researchers discovered four previously unknown carnivorous plants in images shared on the internet. They later found two more plant species when they visited the locations of the images in Western Australia. All the newly discovered plant species are carnivorous sundew plants. Until now, only three species were known from the so-called Drosera-microphylla complex.
Photos taken by hobby photographers and citizen scientists have become one of the largest sources of data for biodiversity researchers. According to Fleischmann, these often randomly published photos are of great importance for global animal and plant protection. He explains that the data helps to discover new animal and plant species before they disappear from the earth. In many areas, such as visually striking carnivorous plants, the observation data from amateur scientists on social media now significantly surpasses scientific biodiversity databases.
For example, the Botanical State Collection in Munich cites a sundew species from South Africa, for which there were three historical herbarium specimens and seven photos on a citizen science website in 2018. The citizen science website now includes 307 observations of the plant species, contributed by 131 nature enthusiasts. However, the number of known herbarium specimens has not changed. The data from citizen scientists is helping to identify new species and protect them from extinction. It is a race against time, as many species would go extinct without ever being known.
