OU on the BBC: Saving Species - About the 2010 series

Updated Tuesday 4th September 2012

To mark the International Year of Biodiversity 2010, the BBC and The Open University come together for a special series of radio programmes.

This page discusses the 2010 series of Saving Species. For information on the current series, including broadcast information and extra content from OU academics, visit our main Saving Species page.

Following on from the original BBC series, Great Animal Migrations, comes World on The Move's next installment - Saving Species.

Led by the Natural History Unit, this BBC Radio 4 series investigates the current state of various species from around the world. The series includes observations on African elephants, purple emperor butterflies, African lions, British seabirds, the koala, Australia’s Barrier Reef, the South American rain forest, vultures, short-haired bumblebees and wandering albatrosses.

More people around the globe recognise and acknowledge that the relationship between human beings and the natural world is changing as species loss becomes increasingly apparent.

Through the seasons of the year and the seasons of the Earth, the series follows the life histories of chosen species and reports on how wildlife conservation works in the modern era. From the great and the small, the well known and the totally new, Saving Species explains why people should care about a cricket as much as an elephant.

Forty programmes are being broadcast in two tranches from April until July and then from the end of August until February 2011, and this website will bring you new and exclusive content throughout the series.

As well as bringing you closer to species in the wild and the biologists who study them, you are invited to contribute to an online project - iSpot - where you can upload images and ask questions about biodiversity.

Saving Species is a collaboration between BBC Radio 4, the BBC Natural History Unit and The Open University.

iSpot is a social network where people help each other to put correct names to their wildlife observations, which are captured by photo. The website covers anything wild in the UK.

Thousands of people are already using the site and over 6,000 observations have been made so far. As your number of correct identifications grows, with the help of the iSpot community members, so does your reputation as a species observer.

Why not upload a photo today? Look out particularly for butterflies in the next few months and help to build a picture of their distribution as part of the growing picture of UK wildlife.

iSpot is run by The Open University, is part of the OPAL project and is funded by the Big Lottery Fund (England).