In the face of continual bad news about erratic weather events, global warming, massive flora and fauna extinctions, and natural habitats being disrupted across the world, it’s time we become active participants in the natural world around us. Citizen Science — an umbrella term that includes several activities that map the status of our biodiversity, which could later be followed by an action plan — enables us to make a direct contribution to research, enhance scientific understanding, and learn about the environment.
Worldwide, conservation monitoring programmes rely on user-fed data by enthusiasts and volunteers. Increase in the use of such data means habitats can be closely studied and monitored.
Projects that recruit citizens are getting more ambitious and diverse, and at the same time more challenging. Beyond taking numerable images of flora and fauna to map species, people are now also involved in documenting water-borne diseases and working on various flood models, which could be provide possible solutions in the next few years for the recurrent problem of floods in cities.
In a nutshell, Citizen Science is slowly becoming one of the largest communities in the world for conservation. The idea behind the concept is to involve as many citizens to maximise the amount of data collected for a project, which could then be analysed for a particular cause.
For instance, every year, butterflies and birds in Delhi NCR are carefully documented and monitored seasonally. Butterfly Month is observed in September, with extensive counts of butterfly species done in varied habitats across the city and its suburbs. We ‘capture’ a butterfly’s preferred habitat, the alteration in its distribution or population, if any, in comparison to the previous years. This helps us to study the intricate conditions that butterflies deem sustainable, which in the long run lays the foundation for a conservation action plan.
In 2014, an initiative by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, called ebird.org was introduced to India. The 17-year-old initiative has documented birds globally, with enthusiasts and observers from all across the world diligently uploading their day-to-day area-specific bird checklists.
At the time of their launch in India, only 118 observers were a part of the programme. We uploaded 332 checklists highlighting 189 species of birds from various habitats in Delhi-NCR. Today, the portal celebrates contributions from over 1,472 observers in Delhi-NCR with over 16,000 checklists reporting over 400 different species from the region.
More than 70 million observations from the Ebird citizen-science project helps drive the bird identification app, Merlin, developed by Cornell Lab, is helping users all over the world in identifying a particular species of bird by merely uploading images and feeding information like location, habitat that the bird was found in. Slowly Merlin is being optimised and tested for several regions in the world.
In short, anyone can be a citizen scientist and contribute towards the environment.
The writer is the founder of NINOX - Owl About Nature, a nature-awareness initiative. He is the Delhi-NCR reviewer for Ebird, a Cornell University initiative, monitoring rare sightings of birds. He formerly led a programme at WWF India.
