How do science, citizen science, and nature reinforce each other to address social issues? This key topic was the focus of a podcast recorded last summer by Amsterdamse Bos (Amsterdam Forest) and the Athena Institute, a research institute of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Last week, the podcast was published, and given the interesting insig...

Is it strange to live still optimistically and in hope in times of the polycrisis? This question was posed at this year's Ars Electronica Festival in Linz with the theme HOPE. We attended the festival in early September, and in this blog, we'll briefly discuss the workshop "Plant Life on the POSTCITY Roof" led by botanist Friedrich Schwarz. Togethe...

Suriname has roughly 14 languages - the official and most spoken language is Dutch. One of Suriname's indigenous languages is Trio, which is spoken by the Tarëno, a conglomeration of analogous subgroups and distinct Amerindian groups (Mirella Nankoe, 2017). The total Tarëno population (Tarëno means "people from here") in Suriname can...

The Citizen Science Award 2023, organized by OeAD, is currently taking place in Austria from April 1st to July 31st. Those who participate in one of the eight projects, will have the chance to win and be part of the Young Science Conference in October 2023. We are proud to announce that two of our project partners belong to the ...

The MAKENYA Mammal Atlas App is a Kenyan citizen science mobile-based application that allows users to monitor and track rare and common mammals. It allows users to use their map location or GPS coordinates of the area they spotted a particular mammal, share pictures, and identify the species. The project has been the first Citizen S...

"EBW" stands for "Ergebnisorientierte Bewirtschaftung" ("result-oriented management") and is a highly specialized app for farmers and agriculturists to increase biodiversity in Austrian agricultural and natural landscapes. It serves to agree on concrete results or goals as part of an inspection of agricultural areas by experts, which are to be achi...

At SPOTTERON, we create Citizen Science Apps for a wide array of scientific fields. One of the most exciting topics is phenology - the study of periodically recurring phenomena in nature's annual cycle - and how global warming affects the developmental stages of animals and plants. Volunteer monitoring of nature, the weather and the seasons date ba...

The MAKENYA - Mammal Atlas Kenya project is a Kenyan Citizen Science App to monitor rare and common mammals. Together with scientists of the Zoology Department of Kenya's National Museums, we developed and designed the first mobile Application for an African country running on the SPOTTERON Platform.

I am a Citizen Scientist. I have been one since I was eight years old, albeit without ever hearing the term even once. I was interested in nature, the environment, and I spent hours after hours exploring the wildlife in ponds, my parents' garden, forests, and even brown land. (Oh, I love brown land, I still sneak through construction fences to explore them sometimes :)

Spot-A-Bee, a new app by The University of Glasgow and the Cardiff University aims to find out which plants in urban areas are especially bee-friendly and help bee populations thrive.