Forest COMPASS

The Forest COMPASS website brings together case studies, resources and analysis on community-based forest monitoring in tropical countries. This platform supports knowledge sharing and capacity building of practioners and policy-makers, by showing who is doing what in this space, and how they are doing it. It includes a comparative table of monitoring software and a resource library with over 150 diverse materials (articles, videos, project materials, etc). It also explains why community-collected data is essential for ensuring more efficient, effective and equitable forest initiatives, including the CBD, REDD+ and FLEGT.

Manual para Ciência Aberta (Handbook for Open Science)

This set of manuals will guide researchers interested in adopting open scientific practices. It is in Portugeese language.

I-Tracker

I-Tracker, short for Indigenous Tracker, is a program that helps Indigenous Land and Sea Managers work together to collect and manage information across north Australia. All the tools for I-Tracker are available free from NAILSMA so check out their website if you are interested.

Network of Monitoring Biodiversity

The Biodiversity Monitoring Network is one of product of the first workshop on Participatory Monitoring of biodiversity held in Manaus in April 2011. The focus is on Brazil but the information provided may be of importance far beyond Brazil. The site empowers communities and Protected Areas managers with information and share data, articles, videos, etc..

Project Cobra

Community Owned Best practice for sustainable Resource Adaptive management in the Guiana Shield, South America (COBRA). Novel funding initiatives are on the cusp of implementation across the developing world. Community owned solutions for the management of ecosystem services have the potential to act as showcases for determining the most effective and efficient use of these emerging funding streams in order to maximise social justice and ecological sustainability.

The COBRA Project brings together key South American and European Civil Society Organisations that have extensive experience in enabling and disseminating grassroots solutions to complex problems in the Guiana Shield region of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The research institutions on the project have scientific expertise to rigorously evaluate these grassroots solutions and determine their impact, while the commercial enterprise brings with it the business and technical expertise for promoting the financial viability of these initiatives.

Monitoring biodivertsity on the ground with relevance to climate in Brazilian Protected Area

A slide show 

SocMon

The Global Socioeconomic Monitoring Initiative for Coastal Management (SocMon) works through regional and local partners to facilitate community-based socioeconomic monitoring. Household and community level data are collected to inform dependence on coral reef resources, perceptions of resource conditions, threats to marine and coastal resources, and support for marine management strategies such as marine protected areas. To date, over 60 assessments have been completed in 30 countries.

Arctic CBM

This is an Atlas of Community-Based Monitoring in a Changing Arctic. Arctic communities are actively involved with observing social and environmental change; this atlas was designed to showcase the many community-based monitoring (CBM) projects and initiatives across the circumpolar world.

If you are involved with a CBM project, we hope you will consider joining the atlas. Select the Help link above to learn how to join and contribute.

Extreme Citizen Science: ExCiteS

Extreme Citizen Science is a situated, bottom-up practice that takes into account local needs, practices and culture and works with broad networks of people to design and build new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world.

National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale ecological observation system for examining critical ecological issues.

NEON is designed to gather and synthesize data on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity. Data will be collected from 106 sites (60 terrestrial, 36 aquatic and 10 aquatic experimental) across the U.S. (including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico) using instrument measurements and field sampling. The sites have been strategically selected to represent different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance.

Shark Trust’s Shark Sightings Database

The Shark Trust’s Shark Sightings Database is a key resource for shark conservation. The Sightings Database allows individuals and organisations, anywhere in the world, to submit and record their shark sightings online.

The aim of this project is to generate important data for researchers and conservationists working with sharks, skates and rays around the world.

This information is frequently used in not-for-profit decision-making, education, research, environmental and other public-benefit purposes.

Treezilla

Treezilla is making a map of Britain's trees. All people can use Treezilla to record trees and to find out how they benefit the local environment. The database of trees comes from public records and citizen foresters.

Instant Wild

Images of wild animals are sent to web site user directly from small automatic cameras placed in remote locations in different parts of the world.

When the viewer identify the wild animal by matching the photo with the relevant image in the Field Guide they help save conservationists time by helping to sort the images by species group. This enables scientist to analyze the data much faster and assess whether the threatened animals are increasing or decreasing. This knowledge is essential for effective conservation.

iSpot

iSpot is a website aimed at helping anyone identify anything in nature.

Once you've registered, you can add an observation to the website and suggest an identification yourself or see if anyone else can identify it for you.

You can also help others by adding an identification to an existing observation, which you may like to do as your knowledge grows. Your reputation on the site will grow as people agree with you identifications.

You may also like to visit our forums which offer lively debate around observations and other more general topics.

Vitalsigns

Open Science Laboratory

This online laboratory brings interactive practical science to students anywhere and anytime the internet is available. The laboratory features investigations based on on-screen instruments, remote access experiments and virtual scenarios using real data. Several activities are available to all, while others are available only to registered users.

nQuire

The nQuire software enables you to design and run science inquiries at school,  at home, or outdoors on mobile devices.

Students are guided through the inquiry process,  from creating their research question and planning how they will carry out their inquiry, to collecting data, then sharing and presenting results.

Elephant and Castle Urban Forest campaign

The Elephant and Castle Urban Forest campaign was conceived in June 2011 by Guy Mannes-Abbott and Richard Reynolds. It was born out of a community visioning day hosted by Elephant Amenity Network as a way of popularising the work of the Balfour Street Residents Association and other local residents’ surveying of the forest assets. 

YardMap

YardMap is a citizen science project designed to cultivate a richer understanding of bird habitat, for both professional scientists and people concerned with their local environments. 

eBird

eBird documents the presence or absence of species, as well as bird abundance through checklist data. A simple and intuitive web-interface engages tens of thousands of participants to submit their observations or view results via interactive queries into the eBird database. eBird encourages users to participate by providing Internet tools that maintain their personal bird records and enable them to visualize data with interactive maps, graphs, and bar charts. All these features are available in English, Spanish, and French.

Public Laboratory

Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.

The core Public Lab program is focused on "civic science" in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. Public Lab achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

Nature Locator

Nature Locator work with researchers and organisations to help them use smartphone technology to leverage the power of citizen science. Nature Locator evaluate how crowd-sourcing with GPS phone technology can most effectively help you to gather useful data; then we build the custom software to do it. By making use of re-usable components, Nature Locator keep the costs down.

EpiCollect

EpiCollect.net provides a web and mobile app for the generation of forms (questionnaires) and freely hosted project websites for data collection.
Data are collected (including GPS and media) using multiple phones and all data can be viewed centrally (using Google Maps / tables / charts).

Fugle og Natur

Danish Bird and Nature (www.fugleognatur.dk) is the largest Danish natural website. Bird and Nature has existed since 1/11-2001 and has 21567 registered users. The goal of the site is :

• to gather information about the Danish flora and fauna 

• to strengthen popular natural surveillance as a powerful reference tool for people who are interested in nature 

• to create a nice place to meet others interested in nature 

At www.fugleognatur.dk there is room for everyone from schoolchildren to experts in zoology and botany. 

 

CrowdCrafting

CrowdCrafting is a free, open-source crowd-sourcing and micro-tasking platform powered by the PyBossa software. This platform enables people to create and run projects that utilise online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more. CrodCrafting is there to help researchers, civic hackers and developers to create projects where anyone around the world with some time, interest and an internet connection can contribute.

Indicia

Indicia provides a solution for developing online biological recording. A toolkit that simplifies the construction of websites, Indicia supports wildlife observation recording forms that are as simple or advanced as you need, allow photo upload, reporting, mapping and verification of the records. By providing these facilities via a comprehensive set of highly configurable components, Indicia can be used to build diverse and unique recording solutions, which avoid reinventing the wheel and minimise the cost of development.

SciStarter

SciStarter.com brings together the millions of citizen scientists in the world; the thousands of projects offered by researchers, organizations, and companies; and the resources, products, and services that enable citizens to pursue and enjoy these activities.

SciStarter.com aims to:
• Enable and encourage people to learn about, participate in, and contribute to science through both informal recreational activities and formal research efforts.
• Inspire greater appreciation and promote a better understanding of science and technology among the general public.
• Create a shared space where scientists can talk with citizens interested in working on or learning about their research projects.
• Satisfy the popular urge to tinker, build, and explore by making it simple and fun for people—singles, parents, grandparents, kids—to jump in and get their hands dirty with science.

Spacehack

Spacehack.org is a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. The site launched in November 2008, partially influenced by the NASA Authorization Act of 2008, Sec. 408 Participatory Exploration that called to “facilitate participation by the public, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners”.

CitizenCyberLab.en

The Citizen Cyberlab (The Lab) will research and evaluate on-line collaborative environments and software tools that stimulate creative learning in the context of Citizen Cyberscience. Beyond helping scientists execute laborious tasks, Citizen Cyberscience projects enable citizens to learn about science and take part in the more creative aspects of research. Little is known about the learning and creativity processes stimulated by such projects, even though millions of volunteers participate. Even less is known about how to optimize those processes.

NestWatch

NestWatch is a nationwide monitoring program designed to track status and trends in the reproductive biology of birds, including when nesting occurs, number of eggs laid, how many eggs hatch, and how many hatchlings survive. Our database is intended to be used to study the current condition of breeding bird populations and how they may be changing over time as a result of climate change, habitat degradation and loss, expansion of urban areas, and the introduction of non-native plants and animals.

Community Measuring, Reporting and Verification

The project trains local people to measure the health of their forests and the wellbeing of their communities using open source software developed for mobile phones. The data collected by the communities helps them to:

• make an informed decision on whether to opt-in to REDD+ schemes, which offer payments for forest ecosystem services

• sustainably manage their resources

• enhance national monitoring efforts with detailed local information