Citizen science and online data: Opportunities and challenges for snake ecology and action against snakebite

The secretive behavior and life history of snakes makes studying their biology, distribution, the epidemiology venomous snakebite challenging. One most useful, versatile, easiest to collect types biological data are photographs, particularly those that connected with geographic location date-time metadata. Photos verify occurrence records, provide on phenotypes ecology, often used illustrate new species descriptions, field guides identification keys, as well in training humans computer vision algorithms identify snakes. We scoured eleven online two offline sources snake photos an attempt many possible, explain some inter-species variation photograph quantity among global regions taxonomic groups, regard medical importance, human population density, range size. collected a total 725,565 photos—between 1 48,696 3098 world's 3879 (79.9%), leaving 781 “most wanted” no (20.1% all currently-described December 2020 release Reptile Database). list wanted sortable by family, continent, authority, encourage photographers worldwide submit associated metadata, “missing” species, permanent useful archives: Database, iNaturalist, HerpMapper. • photos. A 107 countries, mostly developed, small, or insular, have represented. Medically-important more databases than other species. importance. metadata &