Citizen-science projects are blossoming all around the world. And, with their rise, networks have been forming to help them in their work. These networks aim to promote citizen science, facilitate idea sharing, and better connect researchers with citizens wanting to contribute to science. For example, in the northern hemisphere the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) […]
In a world of remorseless (and often accelerating) biodiversity decline, one bright star that seems to shine brighter all the time in the conservation firmament is the movement called ‘citizen science’. According to Wikipedia, the term itself only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year, suggesting it has only recently achieved a certain ‘orthodoxy’. Of […]
Saturday, 9 May 2015 was the date of eBird’s inaugural Global Big Day, where citizen-science birders working with eBird (and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which founded eBird) attempted to observe and record as many bird species as possible in a single day, while raising $500,000 for global bird conservation. And, guess what, over 4,000 […]
As electronic devices have become more advanced, mobile and readily available, citizen-science projects that utilize smartphones, tablets, and laptops have been popping up like corn in a hot saucepan (consider the Global Big Day). It’s tempting to think that citizen science is a child of the digital age however public input into scientific research has […]
A joint CEED and Eremaea-eBird conference (UQ, March 2015) The times, they are a changing. Science is no longer only the realm of an elite body of academics locked in their ivory towers. Today, millions of people from all sorts of backgrounds – artists, teachers, tour guides, computer analysts – are volunteering their time to […]
Are volunteers the way of the future for effective decision-making? Citizen science, the involvement of volunteers from the general community in academic research, has become increasingly important in conservation science. Aided by the internet, the popularity and scope of citizen science appears almost limitless. For citizens, the motivation is to contribute to science and better […]
Geographic range size and extinction risk Geographic range size (the size of a species’ distribution) is often treated as a fixed attribute of a species for the purposes of calculating extinction risk (see the segment below, on EOO & AOO). All else being equal, species occupying smaller geographic ranges are assumed to have a higher risk […]
Where east meets west, where best to invest? For species that are increasingly threatened by the combined effects of habitat loss and climate change, we need to identify priority regions where we should be focussing our conservation efforts. In the case of specialist leaf-eaters, considering the effects of climate change on the distributions of their […]
Saving a ‘most endangered’ from a ‘most invasive’ Did you know that there are fish living in the Australian desert? Obviously, fish need water, and that’s usually scarce in the desert. However large parts of arid Australia sit over the Great Artesian Basin, which is an area where groundwater is under such pressure that if […]
When what we are after is outcomes In the past few months we have been piecing together our Threatened Species Recovery hub. The hub is part of NESP, the National Environmental Science Programme funded by the Australian Government Department of the Environment and innumerable partners. During this process, several people have asked us why we […]