Citizen Science Training: Introduction to City Nature Challenge
Date and time
Location
Online event
This webinar will introduce you to City Nature Challenge, a yearly citizen science wildlife recording event in many cities worldwide
About this event
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?
City Nature Challenge is an annual friendly competition between cities across the world to record local wildlife. It has taken place from a Friday to a Monday every April or May since 2016, and in that time has grown from 2 cities to over 400. Any member of the public can participate, and historically three elements were part of the competition: 1) how many people participated, 2) how many observations were made and 3) how many different species were recorded. Usually, many cities held BioBlitzes and other community events as part of City Nature Challenge. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the competitive element has been reduced and the emphasis has been on safe cooperation.
Would you like to enter your city for City Nature Challenge in 2023, plan a City Nature Challenge event, or simply learn more about it? Then this talk is for you. Alice Sheppard from UCL it will cover:
- The history of City Nature Challenge
- How the wildlife recording is done - and what the most popular methods can and can't do
- How City Nature Challenge has adapted to the pandemic
- Some examples of events led by cities, with behind-the-scenes stories and tips!
After the talk, we'll have a short time for discussion and questions. The audience will be invited to share their experience of wildlife recording if they wish.
Alice 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.
This talk will be followed directly with a talk on Citizen Science Event Planning. You will be very welcome to attend either or both.
Who is this webinar for?
Anybody who is interested in citizen science or who would like to learn more about City Nature Challenge! You do not have to be a researcher or expert to get involved in citizen science. On the other hand, you may be a researcher or belong to a science or conservation organisation and wish to run more public events.
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.