SPOTTERON

The Natural History Museum in London is a natural history museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington.
The museum is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 80 million items within five main collections: botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology and zoology.
The museum is particularly famous for its exhibition of dinosaur skeletons and ornate architecture—sometimes dubbed a cathedral of nature.

A brand new feature for all Citizen Science apps on the SPOTTERON platform comes with the next release version: Citizen Science Events. With this new extension, the project teams can publish events like workshops or field trips directly in the Citizen Science app. Secondly, it is possible to create area events, to e.g. highlight, where more observations by the Citizen Scientists are needed.

Together with the German center for Biodiversity Research iDiv we have created a video clip "Explore Citizen Science" during the CitSci Summer School 2019. The video is released as Creative Commons and can be used by everyone to promote Citizen Science on their own website or channels, as long as they cite the authorship. Download the free Citizen Science video now here > https://www.spotteron.net/blog-and-news/explore-citizen-science-a-co-created-citizenscience-video-clip-for-free-use

During the iDiv Summer School 2019 "Citizen Science – Innovation in Open Science, Society, and Policy" in Leipzig, Germany, we co-created the concept for a free Citizen Science video called "Explore Citizen Science", which you can download and use freely.

During summer, many conferences on Citizen Science and other events are happening. To spread the word about Citizen Science and share our experience in creating interactive Citizen Science apps, we had quite a schedule this year..

In the SpiderSpotter App, Citizen Scientists can share observations of spiders and their webs to help the research about their adaptation to the environment and contribute to biodiversity monitoring. The App features a range of spider species and it has an active community of spider enthusiasts and arachnologists.

A new Citizen Science app has been released on the SPOTTERON platform: in the Coastal Observer project, Citizen Scientists contribute about rising water, floods and extreme weather situation to help with climate change research.

Coastal areas are in constant evolution, but in times of the imminent climate crisis, the coastline will change dramatically, and extreme weather phenomena are already starting to be part of our daily life. The Coastal Observer Citizen Science project explores these effects and their impact on the environment and our mood. By contributing observations about floods, tides storms and water quality, Citizen Scientists can help the University of Delaware, US, with their research.

The decision to use the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform for our participatory project can be summarized best in this way: it was possible in a short time to create a well-working and user-friendly Citizen Science app for our research. The positive feedback on our project "Landauf - LandApp" shows that involving citizens in a scientific project can be a lot of fun when using the right tool.

Last week, the Austrian Citizen Science conference took place in Obergurgl, Tyrolia and we took the occasion to arrive one day earlier to visit the mountainside and get a good view of the impressive landscape surrounding the area.As Citizen Scientists, we always love to stumble apon new things to record and contribute in various scientific projects.