Read the full story in Wired.
The London-based social enterprise is turning regular people into at-home zookeepers.
Category: Citizen science
New tool launched to track Europe’s 3bn trees target
Read the full story at Agriland.
Under the European Green Deal, the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 commits to planting at least 3 billion additional trees in the EU by 2030.
To assist in keeping track and count of all these trees, the European Commission and European Environment Agency (EEA) have launched a tree-counting tool called Map My Tree.
How you make a map of the trillions of miles of invisible fungus networks that give our soil life
Read the full story at Fast Company.
A network of mycelium runs through all the world’s dirt, helping plants grow and sequestering carbon. A massive citizen science project to visualize these ‘coral reefs of the soil’ is designed to help efforts to save it.
Webinar: Community and Citizen Science: Making Your Data Count
Dec 15, 2021, 2 pm CST
Register here.
How can community and citizen science contribute to environmental decision-making? Many EPA, state, and tribal environmental programs are increasingly using community and citizen science for environmental monitoring and addressing social and environmental justice concerns. A recent multi-stakeholder workshop explored gaps and needed improvements in data management that will allow for a more efficient flow of data from producers to users. A major focus is on community science projects that involve grassroots activities to address local concerns.
This webinar will showcase community-oriented projects and share ideas from the workshop. Webinar topics will include: How can we design a future that maximizes the use of community and citizen science data? How do we address the barriers that limit data use today? How can EPA serve as a catalyst to build a stronger, more inclusive collaborative network with states, tribes, local government, non-governmental organizations, academia, and other organizations?
Please attend this webinar to learn about the tools and practices used in these exciting community and citizen science projects and how EPA, states, and tribal governments can better support these efforts. Learn more about community and citizen science on EPA’s website.
Highlighted Projects:
- Love My Air Denver – School-based air quality monitoring network that provides real-time air quality data using low-cost technology.
- Urban Heat ATL – Community scientists in Atlanta help map temperature profiles that link to climate change, urban greenspace, city planning, and energy burdens.
- Eastern Shale Gas Monitoring Program – Trout Unlimited supports community stream surveillance for water quality impacts in PA, VA and WV.
- Arizona Water Watch – State program uses a mobile app to accept water data, observations and photographs from volunteers.
The butterflies are back! Annual migration of monarchs shows highest numbers in years
Read the full story from NPR.
Biologists and volunteers across California have already counted more than 100,000 monarchs.
Community science is a powerful tool for conservation
Read the full post from the Aspen Institute.
All too often, though, the concerns of scientists or politicians can be out of step with communities on the front lines of conservation and other environmental issues. Even the most well-intentioned efforts can backfire without the appropriate buy-in from a community, and particularly without the appropriate respect for a community’s existing priorities and expertise.
Community science provides a complementary and novel approach to thorny problems at the intersection between the human and natural worlds.
This camera uses AI to automatically identify the birds in your yard
Read the full story at Fast Company.
The Birdfy camera, which successfully raised funds on Kickstarter, is designed to spot birds at your bird feeder and even let you know what they are.
More eyes on polluters: The growth of citizen monitoring
Read the full story at e360.
In pollution hotspots like western Pennsylvania — where petrochemical facilities are proliferating — local residents, distrustful of companies and government, are taking advantage of low-cost technologies to do their own monitoring of air, water, and noise pollution.
Where’s walrus? Climate researchers ask the internet to help dig through satellite photos
Read the full story at Mashable.
We love a good photo hunt, and we love it even more when such a hunt can actually be helpful for scientific research. That’s the premise of the “Walrus from Space” project. This partnership between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) turns to internet people like you and me for help spotting groups of walrus that pop up in satellite photos.
The project, revealed on Thursday, aims to take “a census of Atlantic walrus and walrus from the Laptev Sea” populations by having an army of citizen scientists pore over satellite imagery in search of the marine mammals. Spotting them in satellite imagery isn’t the easiest task since most walrus aren’t looking up and saying “cheese,” but participating actually does serve a helpful purpose.
Life’s a beach: Finding trends in marine debris across Australia
Read the full story from the University of New South Wales.
Ten years of citizen science data has informed a new study which found plastic dominates the rubbish found on Australian beaches.
Environmental News Bits 