Here are some links to do with citizen science and (mostly) wildlife recording, compiled to support a ‘Café Science’ event I’m presenting at the Darwin Festival in Shrewsbury, 17 February 2012.
Citizen Science (CS) projects, entirely online:
- Herbaria at Home – museums and BSBI in an effective partnership to recruit help with digitising data from plant specimens (UK)
- Cornell bird identification – innovative project to get people to ‘train’ an online identification system (USA)
- WhaleFM – help categorise whale songs (international)
- Instant Wild – help identify mammals recorded on-camera (international)
- Zooniverse – collection of astronomical CS projects (universal)
- Mappiness – uses apps to get people to record how happy they are at particular times, intends to look at whether being out in green space improves happiness [of course it does!], among other aims (UK)
Real-world projects with clever online elements:
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| Thanks to XKCD |
- Evolution Megalab from The Open University – main project has finished but you can still use and contribute to the website
- Nature’s Calendar – you can contribute records of wildlife seasonal change, and also explore the records already online via some ingenious interactive maps (UK)
- OPAL surveys – well-designed environmental surveys with online data entry and analysis (UK)
- Your Wild Life – fun projects looking at wildlife (some of it at micro-organism level) in our homes and on our bodies – armpit biodiversity anyone? (USA)
CS record-breakers:
- Audubon Christmas Bird Count – apparently the oldest CS project in the world, continuous run since 1900
- RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch – apparently the biggest CS project in the world, with over 600,000 participants counting over 10 million birds in 2011
Wildlife survey CS projects mentioned in the talk:
- Darwin Guide – excellent general guide to wildlife recording from the National Biodiversity Network
- Butterfly Conservation surveys
- UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme
- BSBI Loddon Lily Survey plus axiophytes and other projects
- BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Birds Survey
- Ancient Tree Hunt
- Wildflowers Count
- British Waterways Wildlife Survey (plus critique from Jeremy Biggs)
Learning and skills:
- The botanical skills pyramid and FISCs
- Biological recording courses at Birmingham University – currently under threat of closure but hopefully can be re-introduced to a new habitat
- Field Studies Council
- OPAL iSpot from The Open University – help with wildlife identification from a range of very knowledgeable people
Other:
- Wildlife recorders: bingo conservationists? – not sure why this is in the BBC news this week, but it gives some wildlife recorders a chance to put their point of view, which can’t be bad
- Lots more links on my Delicious pages