The MosquitoAlertBCN project has been one of the research initiatives selected by the Pla Barcelona Ciència. It is a project led by CREAF, with the participation of UPF and IRIDEON and the collaboration of the ASPB. The Pla Barcelona Ciència has the support of the Barcelona City Council and the “la Caixa” Bank Foundation.
CREAF, part of the consortium of the project, was the organizer of the event, which took place between November 25 and 27 at the Casa Convalescència in Barcelona, to deepen the challenges is facing the citizen science.
The Big Mosquito Bytes project has been awarded a million euros by the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation. The project will combine citizen science and other massive data sources to develop innovative models that allow predicting the risk of epidemics, as well as visualizing this risk in real time. In the project led by CEAB-CSIC, scientists from UPF, the Max Planck Institute for Demography, the National Center for Epidemiology of ISPCIII and CREAF participate, and it draws heavily on the Mosquito Alert citizen science platform.
Monitoring progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires a huge amount of data. Citizen science could help fill important data gaps according to a new study published in Nature Sustainability. The research, led by IIASA, has involved a large community of citizen science experts from around the world, including Joan Masó, a researcher at CREAF.
Bernat Claramunt participates in the COST Action AlienCSI to address multidisciplinary research questions to develop and implement citizen science strategies to increase the scientific understanding of IAS ecology and dynamics, specifically informing decision-makers to implement technical requirements of relevant legislation.
The observatory is the first of its kind in Spain and CREAF is coordinating the team of scientists behind it. They will be working with volunteers to monitor the evolution of butterfly populations in 54 parks and gardens in Barcelona and Madrid.
We interviewed Yolanda Melero, holder of a PhD in biology, whose studies have revolved around the behaviour and dynamics of American mink populations. At CREAF she is continuing to investigate how animal populations function, but is now focusing on butterflies to learn about biodiversity-friendly city design.
CREAF and the companies Altran and Starlab have led the design of RitmeNatura.cat, a citizen observatory that encourages members of the public to ‘adopt’ a plant, record the changes it undergoes and provide data that can be used to study the effects of climate change.
Acoording to a study published in Nature Communications citizen science has allowed the researchers to cover much more geographic space in comparison to traditional methods, reducing the economic cost of the two-year study eight-fold.
The annual meeting of GEO (Group on Earth Observations) will take place between the 23 and 27 of October in Washington DC. There are two sessions organized by CREAF: one centering on citizen science, and the other on future prospects for EuroGEOSS.
