iNaturalist has been hosting the City Nature Challenge around the world for 5 years. This year is special for us because it was the first time that Australians participated. Challenges ran from April 24-27 in four cities – Greater Adelaide, Geelong, Sydney and Redlands in Queensland, joining cities in this global initiative to celebrate nature in and around urban areas.

The challenge was to document as many species as possible in one weekend. This year was quite different for everybody due to COVID-19 restrictions, and organisers urged participants to carefully follow public health guidelines issued by their local authorities.

Together Australia’s teams contributed a total of 24,39 observations for 4,596 different species.

With many participants observing nature in their backyard, the City Nature Challenge proved to be an excellent way to safely connect with nature and each other while complying with social distancing measures.

‘’Considering the restrictions, the organisers were surprised by the level of engagement including the number of new users. The organisers are enthusiastic about engaging the community to gather and share biodiversity as this has great potential as a tool for biodiversity management in addition to research. While it’s a great way for citizen scientists to improve their knowledge of local biodiversity, ’ said Stephen Fricker, coordinator of the Greater Adelaide City Nature Challenge.

To see more results from the event:

• View Australia’s results
• View the international leaderboard

Major milestone: iNaturalist Australia hits 1 million observations

Six months after the launch of iNaturalist Australia, we hit 1 million observations in mid-April. Thank you to all our keen Australian citizen scientists for uploading observations and the expert identifiers for verifying sightings.

iNaturalist Australia is proving to be a popular platform for insect and plant observations. From the recent City Nature Challenge results we can see that 28% of observations were insects and 42% plants.

The global iNaturalist network is one of the most successful citizen science platforms in the world, with instances in 10 different countries. The iNaturalist Australia community is very active with over 18,000 observers and over 8,000 identifiers

New look for iNaturalist Australia

The global iNaturalist brand has recently had a refresh and iNaturalist Australia has joined in too. The iNaturalist Australia logo now looks like this – so keep an eye out for bright green bird!

iNaturalist and the ALA

Collaborating with iNaturalist is a wonderful opportunity for the Atlas of Living Australia and our users. It provides an easy-to-use desktop and mobile platform, support for species identification, and tools for assessing data quality. All iNaturalist Australia data is regularly fed into the ALA.

Human observation data – individual sightings of species – are a valuable part of the ALA. This data helps to create a more detailed picture of our national biodiversity, and assists scientists and decision makers to deliver better outcomes for the environment and our species. iNaturalist Australia’s species identification features and data quality measures ensure individual sightings are more valuable than ever.

More links and information:

• To start using iNaturalist visit How to create an account with iNaturalist
• For more information about the City Nature Challenge, visit City Nature Challenge 2020 – Australia

A curious kind of wasp

Velvet ants (Mutillidae) are wasps that parasitise bees, carefully invading their nests and targeting their larvae by laying their eggs on or in this unsuspecting fresh food source. Unlike other parasitoid stinging wasps, velvet ants do not use their sting to paralyse their prey, but to protect themselves against predators or fight their way into bee nests.

Female velvet ants are wingless and covered with often brightly-coloured hairs, giving them the appearance of velvety-soft ants. This belies their sting, which is one of the most painful in the world.

Mimicry in velvet ants

Many velvet ant species are müllerian mimics. This is a type of mimicry where species evolve matching colours and patterns to warn predators that they share a harmful or unpalatable defence. It differs from Batesian mimicry, where a harmless species mimics a harmful one, such as a hover fly evolving the striped pattern of a bee.

Around the world, velvet ants are known to form müllerian mimicry rings (groups of unrelated species that look similar and occupy the same area) with other species of velvet ants and wasps.

“We are investigating the spatial patterns that result from the evolution of müllerian mimicry in velvet ants,” says Dr Juanita Rodriguez, a hymenopterist at the Australian National Insect Collection.

“Due to their very painful sting, velvet ants are ideal for studying the evolution of müllerian mimicry,” she says. “This strong, painful signal accompanied by a warning colouration teaches predators to keep away. Having a certain colour pattern provides an evolutionary advantage to velvet ants, keeping them safer from predators.”

Some very interesting discoveries have been made by studying mimicry. For example, humans may be driving mimicry patterns in weeds that have evolved to look like crops and survive weeding. Other recent studies show that climate change may be driving mimicry patterns in some insects.

Calling citizen scientists to help expand our knowledge of mimicry in velvet ants

The Australian National Insect Collection has developed an online game for citizen scientists to play. In this mimicry game, players take on the role of a predator, such as an insectivorous bird.

As a predator, what would factor in when deciding whether or not to feed on an insect? The game should take less than 15 minutes to play.

How to play

1. Go to http://www.comparevelvetants.com/
2. Look at the images and rate – on a scale from 0 to 10 – the similarity of one insect (on the left) to a group of insects (on the right).
3. Click Next, to move to the next set of images.
4. Images will continue to appear as long as you keep rating so feel free to stop at any time.
5. To stop, close your browser window.

This study builds on previous work by CSIRO’s digitisation team and citizen scientists to image more than 5000 velvet ant specimens in the Australian National Insect Collection and transcribe the label data for each specimen using DigiVol.

The results

“Our study will help expand our breadth of knowledge on the occurrence of mimicry complexes in nature and will provide insights on the evolution of mimicry in these charismatic insects,” Juanita says.

When the study is over, the results will also be published in scientific papers, public reports, conference presentations and online.

If you’re not already an expert entomologist and can spare 15 minutes, play the mimicry game! http://www.comparevelvetants.com/

Citizen Science Bushfire Forum

On February 14^th, the ALA and CSIRO hosted a national Citizen Science Bushfire Forum, bringing together many key national partners and interested stakeholders across multiple sectors including research, state and commonwealth government, non-government organisations, industry and citizen science. these groups to begin discussions.

The objectives of this forum included the sharing of ideas for how science and citizen science sectors could work together in cohesion around a common goal, and to identify actions that could be taken immediately to support the sector through the current bushfire response and recovery phase. The scope of the forum was not limited to ecological biodiversity, but also included air, water, and the built environment.

The group discussed the ability to collate resources through common approaches and the need to ensure that all relevant data becomes available in Australia’s national databases such as the ALA, enabling effective landscape scale responses.

Identifying bushfire recovery related projects

We have created a specific category for bushfire recovery related projects, and when tagged, they will appear when searched under the bushfire recovery projects filter on the Citizen Science Project Finder.

If you are planning on creating a new bushfire related citizen science project, we encourage you to register your projects into the Citizen Science Project Finder, ensuring you identify the project as a bushfire recovery/monitoring project. If you have already registered your project, simply edit the project to indicate that it is bushfire recovery/monitoring related. By indicating your project is bushfire recovery related, it will display when the bushfire recovery projects filter is enabled, making the project easy to discover, access and for people to join.

There are already several bushfire related projects using this filter, such as the Environment Recovery Project – Australian Bushfires 2019-2020.

It is important to note that the Australian Citizen Science Association Bushfire Working Group has developed a set of criteria that will be applied to all tagged projects to ensure they are producing data that is publicly accessible, shared into data aggregation depositories such as the ALA, compatible with other data sets, and appropriate to landscape scale assessment, monitoring and response.

In the coming weeks we will be calling on the public and the citizen science community to contribute to the existing projects or continue to create their own with guidance from researchers.

Follow the below links for more information on bushfire recovery and citizen science

• Citizen Science Project Finder
• CSIRO bushfire research
• CSIRO bushfire blog posts
• The Australian Citizen Science Association

Back to ALA Newsletter February 2020

During the Ecological Society of Australia conference delegates and the Launceston community are being invited to contribute to science and environmental decision making by participating in a BioBlitz.

Whilst ecologists discuss how best to manage our landscapes, they’re calling on locals to download the iNaturalist app and upload all the nature they see between 25 and 29 November into the ESAus19 BioBlitz.

“The aim is to collect as many plant, animal, and fungi observations as possible around Launceston and surrounds in the week of the conference to get a snapshot of the environment,” says Peggy Newman from the Atlas of Living Australia.

“The observations will be uploaded to the Atlas of Living Australia which is used by governments, researchers, consultants and land managers when they make decisions about the future for our native species, for example whether to fund recovery plans for threatened species, or approve a development applications.”

Observations will be updated in real time here.

One researcher attending the Conference has put to call out to Tasmanians to help him find Honeyeaters around Hobart, but would be most interested in any sightings of these birds in Launceston.

“This threatened group of woodland birds nest in a very specific part of the landscape, so I need the community’s help to find a collection of local species in one place and interacting. This is usually a single flower tree in a park, so I need the help of Tasmanians to tell me where your Honeyeaters are,” says Graham Fulton from the University of Queensland.  

The Atlas of Living Australia has teamed up with global iNaturalist encouraging citizen scientists to use iNaturalist Australia to record sightings. They are also encouraging experts to help identify species.

Peggy Newman will be speaking at ESA2019 in Launceston about the launch of iNaturalist Australia, the Australian node of iNaturalist, the world’s leading global social biodiversity network.

Contact and more information

• Peggy Newman, Atlas of Living Australia, peggy.newman@csiro.au
• Toni Stevens, Ecological Society of Australia, 0401 763 130, media@ecolsoc.org.au

ESAus19 BioBlitz: https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/esaus19-bioblitz
Media releases at: www.ecolsoc.org.au/media-and-events/media-releases
On Twitter: #ESAus19 // @EcolSocAus
Conference website: www.esa2019.org.au

More about iNaturalist Australia

Observe nature and share your findings

You can record observations with iNaturalist Australia on your desktop and by using the iNaturalist app on your iPhone or Android device. Use iNaturalist Australia to help identify what you see and keep a record of where and when you see it. It’s your own nature diary.

All iNaturalist Australia observations are loaded into the ALA regularly. All data in the ALA is accessible and usable for researchers and decision makers to access for environmental and ecoscience research and analysis.

Identify species and help improve data quality

iNaturalist supports a large community of experts and citizen scientists around the world. Its species identification system relies on the expertise of the community, so the more experts the better.

iNaturalist enables conversations between experts and there are taxa experts from around the world contributing to crowd sourced identifications and sharing expertise. So, if you know a moth from a butterfly and a huntsman from an orb-weaver, join the iNaturalist community and share your expertise.

Why the ALA has teamed up with iNaturalist

The ALA is Australia’s national biodiversity database and is keen to improve the quality of human observation data entering the ALA. iNaturalist Australia provides an easy-to-use desktop and mobile platform, support for species identification, and tools for assessing data quality. All iNaturalist Australia data is regularly fed into the ALA and you can link your ALA and iNaturalist accounts to see all your records in one place.

Human observation data is a valuable part of the ALA. It helps to create a more detailed picture of our national biodiversity and assists scientists and decision makers to deliver better outcomes for the environment and our species. iNaturalist Australia’s species identification features and data quality measures will ensure your plant, animal or fungi sightings are more valuable than ever.

A bit more about iNaturalist

iNaturalist Australia is the Australian node of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. It is a global social biodiversity platform designed to share and discuss biodiversity. Built on open source software, it supports open data, and has a strong community engagement focus including the interest and encouragement of the taxonomic community.

To learn more about iNaturalist Australia read the ALA User Guides and FAQs, or email support@ala.org.au  if you have any questions.

This week we launched iNaturalist Australia, the Australian node of iNaturalist, the world’s leading global social biodiversity network.

We now encourage you to use iNaturalist Australia to record your individual plant, animal and fungi sightings. You can still upload sightings using our Record a Sighting function, but we will be phasing it out.

How to record an observation with iNaturalist Australia

You can record observations with iNaturalist Australia on your desktop and by using the iNaturalist app on your iPhone or Android device. Uploading an observation to iNaturalist Australia on your desktop is very similar to using the ALA’s Record a Sighting function.

1. First, go to iNaturalist Australia and click Sign up to create an account. 
2. Log in to iNaturalist Australia and click ↑Upload.
3. Drag and drop your image file or choose the file from your device.
4. Click in the species name box, then select from the list of suggested species.
5. Enter date and location details.
6. Click Submit 1 observation.
7. Your record will appear on the Your observations page, where you can see all your records in a list or on a map. On this page, you can sort and search your observations by date, taxonomy or location.

All iNaturalist Australia observations are loaded into the ALA regularly. 

User guides and FAQs

To learn more about iNaturalist Australia including how to link your iNaturalist and ALA accounts, read our User Guides and FAQs:

• ALA and iNaturalist Australia
• How to create an account with iNaturalist
• How can I see my iNaturalist records in the ALA?
• All iNaturalist Australia help articles

Please also feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Why we’ve teamed up with iNaturalist

We are keen to improve your user experience as well as the quality of human observation data entering the ALA. For these reasons, we recently became a signed-up member of the iNaturalist network, and now manage iNaturalist Australia, our localised gateway into iNaturalist (for more information on this collaboration read ALA-iNaturalist collaboration).

Collaborating with iNaturalist is a wonderful opportunity for us and our users. It provides an easy-to-use desktop and mobile platform, support for species identification, and tools for assessing data quality. All iNaturalist Australia data is regularly fed into the ALA and you can link your ALA and iNaturalist accounts to see all your records in one place.

Human observation data is a valuable part of the ALA. It helps to create a more detailed picture of our national biodiversity, and assists scientists and decision makers to deliver better outcomes for the environment and our species. iNaturalist Australia’s species identification features and data quality measures will ensure your plant, animal or fungi sightings are more valuable than ever.

Benefits of iNaturalist Australia

• Species identification: using image recognition suggestions and community expertise, iNaturalist helps you identify the plant, animal, or fungi you have found.
• Improved data quality: iNaturalist’s species identification system helps citizen science records become ‘Research Grade’. This in turn means the observation data you enter is more valuable and more likely to be used by scientists and others to manage, protect and conserve our biodiversity.
• Excellent user experience: iNaturalist has a clear, easy-to-use interface on both desktop and mobile devices. You can view your sightings on a map, or in date order, view other images of the same species, and participate in species identification conversations.
• Open data: the ALA receives regular data feeds from iNaturalist Australia. iNaturalist is built on open source software development and has open data at the core of its mission — this mirrors the ALA’s core principles.

A bit more about iNaturalist

iNaturalist Australia is the Australian node of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.

iNaturalist is a global social biodiversity platform designed to share and discuss biodiversity. Built on open source software, it supports open data, and has a strong community engagement focus including the interest and encouragement of the taxonomic community.

iNaturalist has a strong commitment to improving data quality for science and international collaboration.

Read more on the iNaturalist blog.

There are so many opportunities to explore science, meet scientists and make real contributions to Australian science.

National event

Great Aussie BioQuest

10-18 August Participate with QuestaGame (mobile app game)

The third annual Great Aussie BioQuest is on track to be the biggest yet. Help lead your state or territory to victory – with $10 000 worth of cash and prizes for science hubs and biodiversity education in schools. To play, download QuestaGame onto your smartphone and map biodiversity during National Science Week. Submit photos of wildlife in your neighbourhood and learn about it from experts, while earning points for your state or territory. Help identify the submissions of other players and earn even more points. The data you collect will be shared (with your permission) with the ALA. Visit The Great Aussie BioQuest website for more information.

Queensland

Natural Curiosity: Discovering the secrets of Queensland’s greatest collections

Saturday 6 Apr – 10 Nov 2019, Museum of Tropical Queensland, Townsville

Take the opportunity to step into the collection of stuffed bodies, pickled heads and gaze in wonder as science and nature collide. Discover the secrets of the natural world and why museums hold the key to protecting it.

Queensland Museum: Behind the Scenes Tour

Saturday 17 August 2019, South Bank, Brisbane

Delve into the mysterious unseen world of the Museum’s collection stores with our expert tour guides. This guided tour takes you behind the scenes for a unique chance to see the priceless collections up close and learn more about how we store and look after these precious objects and specimens.

Tasmania

Into the Vaults: an evening at the states zoology collection

Tuesday 13 August, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart

Unlock the vault and explore a space rarely seen by the public. You’ll have an opportunity to be guided by TMAG scientists while investigating a collection that covers whales to weevils and thousands of animals in between. You’ll also hear all about TMAG’s latest research on Tasmanian animals.

New South Wales

Science in the City

6-15 August, Australian Museum, Sydney

The biggest celebration of science for schools and the community with interactive workshops, shows, and a speciality Expo demonstrating the latest in science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM), it’s hard not to get inspired.

Western Australia

Western Australian Museum

10-18 August, WA Museum, Various locations across Perth

The Western Australian Museum is ready to celebrate National Science Week this year with fun, hands-on and educational activities throughout the metropolitan area. There will be something for everyone with fascinating activities ranging from the world of maritime archaeology, virtual realities, marine art, becoming a citizen scientist, and behind-the-scenes tours.

Australian Capital Territory

InterACTive Science

Saturday 10 August, The Shine Dome, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra

A family-friendly event featuring weird and wonderful public talks, hands-on activities, live performers, exciting stalls, food trucks and more. There will be plenty of science action available to all ages during the day.

Victoria

Ask us at Curious?

Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 August, 10am–3pm, Melbourne Museum, Nicholson St, Melbourne

Found something exciting in your garden lately? A fossil, an animal bone, an interesting rock or mineral? Perhaps you snapped a photo? We want to know! Bring us your best science finds and burning questions, and we’ll do our best to help figure out the answer.

Back in 2007 – when Bowerbird.org.au hatched – if you found an unusual looking creature in your backyard and wanted to know what it was, your best bet was to take it to your closest natural history museum, find an expert and ask them directly. It’s this type of interaction that Dr Ken Walker from Museums Victoria valued, and that inspired him.

Ken saw an opportunity in harnessing the enthusiasm and expertise of citizen scientists to build an online digital community for people to share images of backyard inhabitants and request species identification. This was the beginning of BowerBird.

“My favourite expression is ‘show me what’s in your backyard’. I love hearing about what people see and where. Our community of citizens and experts has uncovered some great secrets of the natural world,” Ken said.

Web-based biodiversity science

BowerBird – and other websites such as the global platform iNaturalist – allow new discoveries to be made and shared with the world. They have also shown how members of the public can make significant contributions to our biodiversity knowledge.

“Citizen science is now a well-accepted and valued part of natural sciences. BowerBird and its contributors have helped to secure this status,“ Ken said.

BowerBird migration to iNaturalist

As BowerBird closes, a collaborative rescue operation has been set in motion. A few active BowerBird volunteer heroes and iNaturalist staff have been busy helping almost 50 BowerBird users transfer more than half of all BowerBird records over to iNaturalist. The ALA will pick up the remainder of the records which cannot move across to an active iNaturalist user.

This is a great achievement and is an excellent celebration of BowerBird’s success. You can now see 52,652 observations BowerBird records on iNaturalist.

The same ‘rescue team’ has set up a BowerBird project within iNaturalist, to ensure that the BowerBird community will be able to continue to grow and interact with each other. Access the Bowerbird Project on iNaturalist.

“The time has come to close BowerBird, but we should all be very proud of the legacy that BowerBird contributors have built and the many lessons that citizen science has learnt from BowerBird. I do hope BowerBird users will continue to make valuable contributions to science about our natural world through iNaturalist,” Ken said.

BowerBird highlights

Ken shared with us a couple of his favourite stories of discovery and collaboration that BowerBird facilitated over the last 10 years.

Spider discovered by young citizen scientists
Students from a school in Victoria discovered a small jumping spider during a Bug Blitz field day, and we (Museums Victoria experts) verified the spider’s identification and confirmed it had never been seen in Victoria before. The kids were thrilled and so were we! Read full article

Bee and spider bedfellows in ‘world-first’ uncovered by citizen scientist
Keen amateur photographer Laurence Sanders was walking through the botanical gardens in Emerald, Queensland, to take some pictures of jumping spiders when he spotted something a little odd. Laurence took a series of photos capturing a wolf spider sharing its burrow with a leafcutter bee. He posted the images on BowerBird and it created a real buzz. After checking with experts across the world, I confirmed this was a world-first. This species interaction had never been recorded before. Read full article

Deciding what to tree to plant? Just ask the butterflies.
A group of people associated with a nature reserve somewhere on the Mornington Peninsula, wanted to replant the park with plants species about in the 1950s. So, they looked up the Butterfly dataset on Bioinformatics (the precursor to Bowerbird). They used the map grid query system, which also allowed users to select either a month or decade to query. This allowed them to ask: ‘What species of butterflies occurred in the Mornington Peninsula in the 1950s?’ From the results, they found food plant data per species, and began to compile a species planting guide for their nature reserve. The result was a list of plants that were eaten by butterfly caterpillars recorded in their area in the 1950s. I was stunned when they thanked me for providing such a dataset and explained how they had used the data.

Australian Native Bees
What I loved about BowerBird was that anyone could create a project and when other people joined that project and contributed image records, then a critical mass of data was built. My own project was Australian Native bees which started out with just me, but now has 524 people who have contributed over 4,000 image records from around Australia.

iNaturalist Australia

The ALA has recently joined the iNaturalist network. iNaturalist has an excellent crowd-sourced species identification system and access to a huge global network of identifiers and observers. By becoming a member of the iNaturalist Network, the ALA will have its own local node called iNaturalist Australia.

Already, all data collected and shared with iNaturalist can be viewed in the ALA. The ALA-iNaturalist collaboration will focus on using the iNaturalist platform for individual sightings in the ALA, which will mean better species identification and data quality. Over the next few months, ALA users will be encouraged to log sightings through iNaturalist Australia. If you have any questions or would like more information, contact support@ala.org.au.

Back to ALA newsletter – June 2019

Over the next few months, we’ll be working with iNaturalist to implement iNaturalist Australia. Already, all data collected and shared with iNaturalist can be viewed in the ALA. The collaboration will focus on using the iNaturalist platform for individual sightings in the ALA, leading to better species identification and data quality, as well as providing access to the largest biodiversity-loving community on the planet.

The iNaturalist community

iNaturalist is a great platform for supporting discussions and discoveries about species. Fundamentally, iNaturalist is a species occurrence recording tool and a crowdsourced species identification system. Its main goals are to connect people to nature, to enhance understanding of life on Earth and encourage people to value it. iNaturalist does this by generating scientifically credible biodiversity data from personal encounters with the natural world.

There are two types of users in iNaturalist:

• Observers: are people who are keen to document and record the biodiversity around them using photos or sounds.
• Identifiers: are people willing to put on their taxonomist’s hat and improve the quality of the records by agreeing or disagreeing on the suggested species. Many identifiers are experts in their field, but they can also be citizen scientists who have an interest in taxonomy. Identifiers underpin the iNaturalist identification system.

Benefits of the ALA–iNaturalist collaboration for ALA users

Improved Species identification

One of the most frequent questions from citizen scientists to our ALA support team is about species identification. Up to now, we’ve only been able to advise users how to seek out species identification for themselves e.g. contact their closest natural history museum or herbarium.

iNaturalist provides access to a larger network of species identifiers – citizen scientists and biologists who identify and verify sightings. This will improve the quality of individual human observation data in the ALA. In turn, this means, individual human observation data will have greater benefit to biodiversity science.

iNaturalist is also a world leader in using machine learning to identify species in an image, this helps speed up the identification process. At the moment it takes an average of 18 days for the community to identify a species, but over half are completed within 2 days.

Improved data quality

As a repository of data from a large number of different data providers, the ALA is continually working on improving the quality of data and improving tools to filter and analyse data.  By using crowdsourced identifications, iNaturalist Australia will improve the quality of individual human observations in the ALA. And better data quality means improved outcomes for biodiversity science.

Watch this space!

We’re working with the iNaturalist platform to make sure we provide the best user experience and data flows for our citizen scientists currently uploading sightings to the ALA.

For more information on iNaturalist Australia, please contact support@ala.org.au

Since colonisation, the coerced centralisation of Aboriginal groups meant that many Aboriginal people were disconnected from their Country. Across Australia there are concerted efforts by Indigenous communities to get back and reconnect to Country. Many things have changed over the last 200 plus years such as native species decline, invasion of new species and changed fire regimes. Our cross-cultural Citizen Science project aims to learn about these changes using Western and Indigenous techniques and include Rangers, Elders and young people to inform current and future land management decision-making.

In September 2018, the Yugul Mangi Rangers of south east Arnhem land and Macquarie University scientists planned a cross-cultural fauna survey for the Wilton River Range, approximately 20 minutes drive from Ngukurr Aboriginal community. This area was chosen as it holds special cultural value to local people. Additionally, Elders recalled the presence of many native mammal species here in the past, such as the critically endangered Northern Quoll and various rodent species, which have not been seen in recent times.

As part of the trip, the survey team partnered with Ngukurr School and took 33 students on the survey with the hope of finding some interesting animal species and teaching students about the value of cross-cultural research. The Year 7 and Year 8-9 classes assisted rangers on the second day of the survey to check, rebait and set animal traps and do a spotlighting survey. Additionally, the senior boys class participated in an overnight trip and assisted with trap checking and maintenance, a spotlighting survey, Indigenous traditional animal surveys (including active searches and fishing surveys) and finally helped pack up the survey sites on the final day.

These activities were led by Yugul Mangi Rangers Clayton Munur, Gene Daniels, Patrick Daniels and Cedrick Robertson. The rangers taught the students about: the use of both western and Indigenous animal trapping techniques; the use of technology for data collection (survey app and tablet); and modern threats to local fauna, such as the Cane Toad (Rhinella marina).

Overall, the survey team recorded 57 fauna species throughout the survey period. Interesting species included the Orange-naped Snake (Furina ornata), Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps), Delicate Mouse (Pseudomys delicatulus), Spiny-tailed Gecko (Strophurus ciliaris) and Metallic Snake-eyed Skink (Cryptoblepharus metallicus).

The team also made some valuable cultural knowledge recordings, as we were lucky enough to have local Urapunga Elder, Dennis Duncan, joining us to speak to the students about the history of the survey area. The location surveyed was Dennis’s country where he grew up with his family, and also holds great cultural significance as a men’s ceremonial area. However, with the building of the Roper Highway, which runs through this country, these ceremonies have been forced to relocate to a different area.

The outcomes of this survey, both social and ecological, demonstrate the value of a cross-cultural approach to citizen science in remote communities. Collaboration with schools and other youth groups provides rangers and community Elders with a platform for the intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge and the engagement of youth in on-country conservation.

Special thanks to the Ngukurr and Urapunga communities, and particularly Urapunga Elder Dennis Duncan for sharing a small part of his local knowledge and hosting the Yugul Mangi Rangers and Macquarie University staff on his country.

The ALA’s facilitation of citizen science is mentioned in a chapter called ‘Technology infrastructure for citizen science’, authored by the ALA’s Citizen Science program lead, Peter Brenton, with co-authors Stephanie von Gavel and Living Atlases colleagues in France and UK. The ALA is also the focus of a case study highlighting how the ‘Living Atlas’ software platform is being adopted by other countries and is facilitating major improvements in data quality; data mobilisation and processing efficiency; and data accessibility and reuse.

You can now download the free pdf version of Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy.

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