Launching an iNaturalist farmland biodiversity observatory across our Farmer Cluster network...
The Framework Project is engaging stakeholders in rural communities and regions through Farmer Cluster visits, workshops and citizen science events.
We're reaching out to the communities in which our Clusters are located for a range of local and regional impacts. This includes farmers and their families, countryside leisure and environmental groups, NGOs and political representatives. Farmers in our Clusters are receiving training to help them monitor the biodiversity that's important to them and their agroecosystems.
Community participation can help farmers from feeling marginalised in their localities and supercharge the amount of data that can be collected. Citizen Science events like Bio Blitzes also offer an opportunity for the wider community to be educated about the biodiversity of their region in a fun and interactive way.
Several Bio Blitz events have taken place so far on the project across our Farmer clusters in Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Scotland, Austria, Estonia and Italy. Recently, project partner The International Institute of Advanced Systems Analysis has collated the results of these into a single profile on the biodiversity data platform iNaturalist.
iNaturalist is a great tool for BioBlitzes as it can be used by anyone with a smartphone in their pocket! But it also allows for data collected to be useful to scientists and farmers for building up a picture of the biodiversity present in agricultural landscapes.
Through the American nonprofit social network, users can share observations of plants, animals, fungi, and more, adding to a global database of approximately 161 million observations.
By recording encounters with organisms and collaborating with experts, users create valuable data for scientific research and resource management. iNaturalist also offers opportunities to become a citizen scientist, participate in missions, and learn from other naturalists. With open-source software and partnerships with institutions like the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic Society, iNaturalist has become a standard-bearer for crowd-sourced biodiversity data.
We look forward to many more Bio Blitzes to come across the project!
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