Learn more about CitizenScience.Asia: citizenscience.asia
CitizenScience.Asia (CS.Asia) is a regional organization that aims to foster and support citizen scientists around Asia. The goal is to promote citizen science, understand the challenges and facilitate solutions to build capacity in Asia through education, resource sharing, advocacy, and collaboration with global counterparts.
Citizen Science Month Webinar
This webinar during Citizen Science Month (April) brought together experts who shared their passion for ecological biodiversity and their stories about how to best engage their respective public about the intrinsic value of preserving these environments. Safiqul Islam from Bangladesh spoke about about “wildmentor” (more project details in his abstract) and Cheng Tao-Lin from Taiwan highlighted the engagement work he does with iNaturalist (see iNaturalist Taiwan’s Facebook page).
CitizenScience.Asia set up a webinar resource document.
Did you know that iNaturalist is a SciStarter affiliate?
From iNaturalist’s SciStarter profile: “iNaturalist is a place where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world. It is also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. You can use it to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users.”
If you add your iNaturalist username to your SciStarter Info&Settings, you’ll be able to track the number and frequency of your contributions in your SciStarter dashboard!
wildmentor is now on SciStarter!
Want to learn more about wildmentor?
Check out their SciStarter page: “Bangladesh is an incredibly biodiverse country, with the Sundarbans mangrove forests as the most relevant hot spot. Bangladesh is a developing country and people depend a lot on their environment. Generally people are very interested in knowing more about the animals that surround them. Cell phone density is very high in Bangladesh, but no app for Bangladesh’s wildlife was existing before ‘wildmentor.’ Furthermore, Bangladesh is one of the prime examples for the effects of global change. It is the most densely populated of the bigger countries of the world. Due to availability of the mobile internet, information’s are available to everyone with an internet connection and smartphones make information even available everywhere we are. This brings first of all great opportunities. Since the loss in biodiversity is one of the biggest threats to our ecosystems, we have to use the new media to make as many people aware of the problem as possible and some platforms already are successful with that (see for example Project Noah). Conservationists are trying to provide information in a way that it reaches the people as it is supposed to reach them. Using catchy platforms can help to reach more people, but it always has to be made sure that the quality of information and the teaching and creation of knowledge is the main objective. Our app provides this kind of quality information for the general public (Google play/“wildmentor”) and it also invites users to actively contribute to the existing knowledge. Our mobile apps is a simple and understandable system which requires no previous experience and it will bring new window for the participatory conservation education of general people and conservationists, it will help sharing place for the Biodiversity conservation education in Bangladesh.”
Want more from CitizenScience.Asia?
CitizenScience.Asia Journal is an on online magazine on “Medium.” Dig into the details about the people using citizen science to address local and global issues in their own communities, as well as how to stay engaged and curious in the time of COVID-19.
On YouTube, CitizenScience.Asia runs an interview series called “CitSciAsia Meets…”
And there’s so much more! Explore CitizenScience.Asia resources online: citizenscience.asia
