Wildlife, citizens, science - Darwin Festival Feb 2012

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:

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