Speed talk on 27th International Onithological Congreass in Vancouver, Cananda, August 19-26, 2018.
In Russia, citizen science is just at the beginning and bird reporting is the most developed part of it. Although there have been a great variety of local bird monitoring activities, they were available for participation almost only to professionals. Recently volunteers usually did not have enough knowledge of birds. Therefore, they often collected unreliable data. The low general knowledge of birds among non-specialists in Russia resulted in difficulties in finding a skillful volunteer to participate in monitoring activities. However, with a lot of effort, this situation had changed significantly in the last 5 years. To improve people's knowledge of birds we organized a local birdwatching community in Moscow (scipeople.net) and started to conduct birdwatching excursions in city parks. This project had found a great interest among local people. With the help of social networks, we were able to attract almost 400 participants with different knowledge and skills. Our community had also attracted and joined people that had learned by themselves. Last year we also joined BirdID program to advance people’s skills in species recognition. Russian bird reporting on-line database (ru-birds.ru) appeared in 2014 and provided opportunity for volunteer observers to share their data. This data is now used for monitoring and conservational purposes such as creation of atlases or red lists, and potentially could be used to influence national policy in conservation of certain areas. Our example shows that even without extra funding the formation of citizen science almost from ground zero is possible just in a few years.
Негізгі бет Citizen science in Russia: at the roots of beginning (Veronika Samotskaya on IOC 2018)
Пікірлер