ALBERT

Description: While systematic biodiversity surveys are common in the Global North, much of the tropics remains vastly under-surveyed. With the rise in popularity of social media and camera phones, millions of people are now sharing their photographs online, which can be an effective source of biodiversity occurrence data. Here, we report on just such an exercise for the animals of Bangladesh, a megadiverse South Asian nation. This dataset was compiled by searching for species distribution records in seven large Facebook groups, following the method described by Chowdhury et al. (2021). The Facebook groups comprised: Birds Bangladesh (https://www.facebook.com/groups/2403154788); Deep Ecology And Snake Rescue Foundation (https://www.facebook.com/groups/959896627527624); Biodiversity of Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/249240636186853); Butterfly Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/488719627817749); Mammals of Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/647662968655338); Amphibians and Reptiles of Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/560709511527645); Biodiversity of Greater Kushtia (https://www.facebook.com/groups/244807066739477). In each group, we searched by species common name, obtained from IUCN Bangladesh (2015), double-checked the identification in each photograph, and georeferenced the observations using Google Maps (https://maps.google.com/). We excluded photographs if the identification was incomplete (coarser than species level), or incorrect; if the photograph did not allow clear taxonomic identification; or if the location was unspecified or could not be accurately determined.