Citizen science is a valuable tool for monitoring different species, especially in
cases concerning truly rare and difficult-to-detect species where time-consuming field
studies are limited and long-term research projects are uncertain. To better understand
the distribution of the rarely collectedCryptopone ochracea(Mayr,
1855) (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) in Hungary, we obtained the occurrence data with photos
uploaded by non-professionals to the page of the largest Hungarian Facebook group
dealing with ants and a citizen-science website dealing with biological data collection.
In this article, we expand the known distribution ofC. ochraceato
include 46 new records from Hungary and one from Serbia. With two historical records,
this previously undersampled species has now been found 48 times in Hungary. Our results
prove that social media platforms and other websites for citizen science projects
offer new and useful opportunities for researchers to involve non-professionals in
scientific work and, thus, obtain large amounts of valuable data, even for understudied
arthropod species.
