Citizen science

The third report of the mBMS, Barcelona’s Metropolitan Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, contains some unexpected findings: the beaches in Barcelona’s metropolitan area are not only inhabited by butterflies, but by butterfly communities unlike those found in the local parks. This means that the beaches act as reserves for certain species of butterflies. Some species found in only relatively small numbers in parks are more abundant at beaches, making such seaside environments especially important for biodiversity conservation in the metropolitan area.

According to a new research study published in the academic journal Sustainability, the technology developed by the Horizon2020 Cos4Cloud project can substantially support networks of citizen observatories, that is, citizen science platforms that gather biodiversity and environmental observations (photos), to increase their data quality and quantity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has arisen at a time when governments were already reasonably convinced of the need to make their data accessible via open data portals. The need in question is a relatively new phenomenon, one with not only technical but also strategic and economic factors.

CREAF recently took part in the latest Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Member Meeting.Held in Madrid in June, the international conference involved speakers from all over the world, each of them looking to promote and share experiences related to the use of standards that facilitate the exchange of information and data between different countries, organizations and platforms. 

Taking photos of the maximum number of living things on the Catalan coastline, such as birds, plants on the promenade, or underwater species, is the objective of BioMARató, one of the largest citizen science and marine observations events to be held in Catalonia between the end of April and early May, as well as throughout the summer of 2021.

The recently formed 'European Open Science Cloud, EOSC’ association incorporates CREAF among its members and other research centers and organizations across Europe.

Creating and validating a methodology to generate citizen science observatories is the common thread of the European project Ground Truth 2.0, which has worked with 4 observatories in Europe (Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden) and 2 in Africa (Kenya and Zambia) in actual operating conditions.

Begoña García has spent many years passionately studying a curious plant, Borderea chouardii. It is a rare species with a biogeographical origin that dates back to the Tertiary and remains confined to a few limestone cliffs in the Central Pyrenees. Unknown until the middle of the 20th century, it is considered an endangered species. But... is it?

The European Union promotes Cos4Cloud, an ambitious project that will create cutting-edge technology services to improve citizen science platforms. Among other services it will include: integrating observations from different citizen science platforms into a portal, artificial intelligence tools that help citizens recognize species when they send an observation and standardize data from different platforms