Citizen Science Challenge #10: Evangelise

Well this has been a fun experiment. I sat here a year ago dreaming up ideas, and that turned into a whole Year of Citizen Science.

It’s been tough too, because anything with the word ‘science’ can be a tough sell. Perhaps one of the highlights was managing to land an article on great citizen science projects in The Biologist magazine. But in a way, that might be preaching to the converted.

What I’m really interested in doing is introducing citizen science to people who have never tried it, never heard of it and think it sounds boring. I’m pretty confident that the staggering variety of amazing projects from around the world, will do the hard work for me. I hope they’ll get bitten by the bug, and tell their friends, who might tell their friends and so on and so on.

And so the final challenge, if you’ve dabbled with some of the projects I’ve highlighted in 2013 and enjoyed them, is to tell your friends in 2014.

Surely that’s even easier and takes less time than many of these projects, but in fact it’s even more important. It goes something like this…

The more people you tell, the more data for these projects.

The more data, the more we learn about the natural world.

The more we know, the better that species and habitats can be conserved.

Not only that, but…

The more successful these projects are, the more citizen science projects will continue to be developed.

And more people will try them, generating more data, encouraging more projects too…

But perhaps the best thing…

It encourages you and me to get outside, to look at the world. To study it and understand it. To value it.

Tell Your Friends About Citizen Science

So if you would like to help me encourage lots of people to try citizen science, then please do share it with one of the useful buttons or copy and paste the text below (or something less silly sounding!).

“I tried citizen science and it was really good fun, why don’t you give it a try too.”

Link: http://www.jamesborrell.com/2013-a-year-of-citizen-science/

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