Digital wildlife recording - reaching a new scale of mass participation

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By Matt Postles, Former Deputy CEO of The Natural History Consortium and Trustee of National Biodiversity Network Trust

Recording wildlife is a great British tradition stretching back to the 1700s, and in the 21st Century, recording in the UK is still a triumph of public contribution to our collective knowledge of the natural world.

Devoted volunteers and enthusiasts generate vast databanks supporting environmental policy, research, and practice with baseline data for thousands of native and non-native UK species.

As threats to UK wildlife mount, the need to grow the evidence base for effective conservation becomes increasingly vital and the development of mobile phone technology, gamification and online community building has helped bring wildlife recording to the masses as a form of digital volunteering.

The race is on!

I have spent the last 10 years supporting a community of practice around ‘BioBlitz’ a wildlife recording event format that brings together public audiences, volunteers and expert naturalists in a race against the clock to find and record as much wildlife as possible in a chosen area.

My first ever public engagement event was a BioBlitz at Tyntesfield National Trust, just south of Bristol, inviting some 200 visitors to scamper around the site with maps, sample pots, lenses and clipboards to gather paper format records of their wildlife encounters.

Nature on your doorstep – breaking geography

Skip ahead a few years and the smartphone revolution has totally shifted the landscape of wildlife recording. Now, a BioBlitz doesn’t have to be limited to a single park, or reserve. With the power of specialist wildlife recording apps, you can invite whole communities, cities, nations and continents to share their wildlife sightings in real time.

What is more, you are no longer trying to bring people to your BioBlitz event – inevitably narrowing the numbers and diversity of people who might participate. You are taking the BioBlitz to them, inviting people to explore and learn about the nature where they are, and may overlook in their daily lives.

Throughout the pandemic and resulting lockdowns The Natural History Consortium (NHC) has been bringing together organisations in the UK and Europe to explore new ways to break geographic boundaries and activate mass participation at scale.

• City Nature Challenge is part of a global community science project using the iNaturalist app platform for collecting data. Started in 2016 between the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences and growing across the whole US in 2017. Since 2018 cities from all four continents have taken part, competing to see which of the 400+ city regions could inspire their communities to collect the most wildlife data. In 2021, over 1.2 million wildlife records were submitted by over 52,000 people across the globe over just four days.

NHC lead Bristol and Bath’s efforts in the challenge whilst supporting a network of other participating cities in the UK and opening up the challenge to those locked down outside the city boundaries.

• European BioBlitz is the world’s first 48-hour continental BioBlitz. Also using the iNaturalist platform, NHC and partners launched this international challenge for European Researchers Night 2021, as a collaborative effort for the people of 43 countries to come together and put nature on the map. 8,400 people collected over 54,000 wildlife observations on a single weekend – just a slight upscaling from that weekend in Tyntesfield in 2011!

Digital connections

Recording apps and online communities have revolutionised the way people share their experiences of wildlife and nature. Amazing initiatives like iSpot have paved the way for amateur naturalists and enthusiasts to collaborate and share their skills online, and recording tools like iRecord and iNaturalist have made the act of recording more convenient and accessible. (Spot the trend for how to name these things!)

Meanwhile social media has provided a platform for a growing fandom of self-proclaimed young ‘nature nerds’ inspiring their followers to reconnect and rediscover their passion for nature. Shared challenges and ‘game’ experiences allow people with shared interests, but isolated by geography, to interact and this was never more evident than in the 2020 lockdown when City Nature Challenge helped people across the UK and the world connect with nature and each other from their windows, gardens and local parks.

Connecting up the dots

With the expansion of online recording and multiple platforms each catering to different audiences and data collection methods, there is a lot of work to be done behind the scenes to ensure that the data collected is robust and useful to the decision makers who influence the way our landscape and green spaces are managed.

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) is the UK’s largest aggregator of wildlife data and works with a huge breadth of partners, data contributors and data users to provide a one-stop-shop for wildlife data through an amazing online tool – the NBN Atlas. The Atlas holds over 200 million species records and most data recording apps and organisations feed into this huge database through a complex web of verification and validation processes, creating a collaborative resource that informs policy, landscape management, planning and conservation efforts across the UK.

The NBN Trust works with the platforms and partnerships to align and embed best practice to make sure that decisions for nature in the UK are made using the very best available evidence and data, whilst inspiring people to take action for their local wildlife by contributing their sightings.

Get in touch

To see how you could link up your projects and activity with these schemes, get in touch with The Natural; History Consortium (bioblitz@bnhc.org.uk) or the National Biodiversity Network (support@nbn.org.uk)

Get involved

Make your walks a little wilder in 2022 and spot nature on your doorstep for the 5th international City Nature Challenge. Join a global community on this epic mission to spot as much wildlife as possible and put nature on the map in your neighbourhood from April 29th to May 2nd. This year the worlds biggest urban wildlife spotting event is breaking out of the city and inviting everyone to download the free iNaturalist app and start sharing your wildlife sightings from your windows, gardens and local parks wherever you are in the UK.

Visit citynaturechallenge.org.uk to find out more and take part!

First published in CJS Focus on Volunteering in affiliation with the Association of Volunteer Managers (AVM) on 28 February 2022. Read the full issue here

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