Material

Online Citizen Science Projects 

(Run by us and suitable for all skill levels)

X-Polli:Nation

X-Polli:Nation (pronounced Cross-Pollination) is a citizen science project that encourages people, especially younger children, to create, maintain and monitor pollinator-friendly habitats.  You can get information about how to create pollinator-friendly habitats, take part in pollinator surveys, learn about pollinators and how to spread the word about their conservation.  X-Polli:Nation also researches how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can work alongside human intelligence in monitoring our environment, how people and AI can help each other in science learning, and how outdoor learning and citizen science can be incorporated into our primary and secondary schools. 

Planting for Pollinators

We are a pollinator citizen science project collecting data on pollinator abundance and feeding behaviours. We are launching this site with a focus on bumblebee species and hope to extend out tools and surveys to flower beetles and butterflies during the spring and summer of 2021.

We have developed new technologies to benefit citizen scientists and nature conservation programmes Computer scientists and ecologists from the Open University, Aberdeen University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences are collaborating with a wide range of partners on retaining the best of the decade-old BeeWatch citizen science project and developing and updating it further.

Several computer science technologies have been developed for Planting for Pollinators: Natural Language Generation and Automated Image Recognition alongside a visual "key" help you to become familiar with bumblebee identification. Your data generates a better collective understanding of the distribution of these important pollinators within our country and their feeding habits.You can browse our citizen science data through our innovative pollinator-friendly plant recommender, or on a map showing where different species have been recorded.

iSpot Nature

iSpot is a citizen science project run by The Open University (OU) that was developed to help anyone learn about and engage with nature while sharing and building their wildlife identification skills. Supported by a diverse and growing online community of nature enthusiasts, iSpot has grown into a database of over 1.5 million posted photos. There are hundreds of thousands of observations of species from a wide range of groups, including amphibians and reptiles; birds; fungi and lichens; fish; invertebrates; mammals; plants and other organisms. iSpot is free and easy to use: share your interest with a friendly community, look at the latest spots, take photos of wildlife, add your own observations, join in discussions and get help identifying what you've seen.

Links to External Citizen Science Projects 

(Not run by us and suitable for more advanced recorders)

UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme

PoMS is the only scheme in the world generating regular and orderly data on the abundance of bees, hoverflies and other flower-visiting insects at a national scale (currently across England, Wales and Scotland). There are two surveys you can take part in - watching specific flowers for 10 minutes and recording the insects that visit the flower, or adopting a designated 1 km² survey square where you trap and record the insects present. Combined with records from other schemes, these data will allow us to measure trends in pollinator populations and guide where to target conservation efforts.

National Moth Recording Scheme

You can use the National Moth Recording Scheme to enter, store, map and analyse your own moth records. You’ll also be able to see what other recorders have observed in your area and around the country. Moth records entered online will be passed to the appropriate County Moth Recorders for verification and incorporation into local datasets, before becoming part of the main National Moth Recording Scheme database.

Garden Butterfly Survey

The Garden Butterfly Survey allows you to record and report the butterflies that visit your garden over the course of a year. Create a free account, submit your sightings and help us monitor garden butterfly populations. The more we learn, the better we can target conservation effort to help struggling butterfly species.

BeeWalk Survey Scheme

BeeWalk is a national recording scheme run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust to monitor the abundance of bumblebees across the country.  Volunteers identify and count the bumblebees seen on a monthly walk along a set route from March to October.  Anyone can become a BeeWalker – all you need is a spare hour or so every month to walk a fixed route of about a mile (you choose where it goes), and then send us your sightings.