The Erasmus+ HEIDI project is including a series of Citizen Science Training Webinars to encourage people to try out citizen science - not just participating in projects, but, if they wish, creating and running their own.

What will happen in this webinar?

This webinar will be a short talk followed by questions and discussion. It will focus largely on City Nature Challenge, an annual friendly competition between cities across the world to record local wildlife and usually includes a large number of public events such as BioBlitzes and other community activities. However, this webinar will cover other areas, such as public astronomy events, and safety planning during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alice Sheppard, from UCL Extreme Citizen Science, has been involved in planning several City Nature Challenge events in recent years, along with other organisations such as the Natural History Museum, Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, the Royal Parks and many others. In this talk, she will cover:

• Examples of outdoor citizen science events, such as BioBlitzes
• Some success stories - and failure stories! - of past City Nature Challenge and other public citizen science events in London
• What to bear in mind when planning outdoor events
• Useful tips and ways to prepare

Audience members who have run or participated in such events will be very welcome to share their stories if they wish. There will be time for Q&A.

Immediately prior to this talk we are holding another 30 minute session, "Citizen Science Training: Introduction to City Nature Challenge". You will be very welcome to attend either or both.

Who is this webinar for?

Everyone who is interested in running a public citizen science event! You may be a student or researcher interested in outreach, or belong to a science or conservation organisation. You may also be a member of the public who is simply interested or would like to get started in citizen science yourself.

Citizen Science For All Talks

The Citizen Science for All Talks is a series of webinars and special events which invite world-leading experts on citizen science to give a talk in their field of expertise to share their experiences and knowledge with our diverse audience, including those who at the moment know very little about Citizen Science. It is organised by UCL’s People Nature Lab and Extreme Citizen Science.

What Is Citizen Science?

There are many forms of Citizen Science, and no single definition captures them all! In general, it means that members of the public who aren’t currently working as scientists get involved in scientific research. This may be something very simple like using their smartphone to measure sky brightness, or it may be very involved such as getting a group of people together and learning scientific methods to monitor and report pollution. There are many public Citizen Science projects on an enormous range of topics.

What Is HEIDI?

The Erasmus+ project, HEIDI (“Digital Action at HEIs as a catalyst for social change in the Covid-19 crisis”), aims to provide training (for staff, decision makers, students, librarians, and communities) enabling Higher Education Institutions to better embrace and support bottom-up digital action (i.e. hackathons, makeathons and citizen science initiatives). Until 2023 we will be running 90 events (in the UK, France, Malta, Cyprus and Greece) and aim to engage more than 3,000 people.

HEIDI is supported by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Union under Grant Agreement no. 2020-1-UK01-KA226-HE-094667.