I recently created a site for birders (and nature enthisists) to contribute bird sightings to a citizen science database. Here sightings are organized and shared with the public.

These observations help document when and where bird species normally exisit and hopefully will aid conservation efforts by providing this evidence, as its hard to conserve something that has not been documented in an area previously.

Does anyone think this has any potential to aid conservation efforts? Individuals and organizations can try it out at junponline.com , your feedback would be appreciated.

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Wildlife and Plants Sightings Citizen Science

From a B.C. perspective and North American perspective, does this not duplicate the efforts of other databases? E-Bird is a North American database that hundreds of birders contribute to and has become increasingly popular. This tool can be used to track bird populations and does have potential to work towards conservation. In B.C., rare plant sightings should be submitted to the Conservation Data Center (along with other sightings of other provincially-listed species). E-Fauna and E-Flora are tremendous efforts and they are an invaluable resource to B.C. naturalists - these two projects have had an amazing showing of support and hopefully people help build the image databases and, if exact location coordinates are taken, contribute to our understanding of the distributions of species in B.C.

In summary, I don't think your site is a bad idea and not worthy of attention, but I think the niche has already been filled at least on the provincial level. If more sites like yours are started, it could dilute the efforts of other databases working towards the same goal.

Jeremy Gatten
Saanichton, B.C.

Those are all great sites. I've tried them and found them to be a little challenging to use so I've tried to create a more user friendly design and make it a one stop shop (no need to visit multiple sites).

In a couple years I suspect all these sites will be sharing and pooling wildlife sighting data as they are all generally working towards the same goals and are typically non-profit organizations, so they typically are not posessive when it comes to their sighting data but share and promote it. Standardizing the data for this seems to be slowly happening at the moment, I just added a Order and Family field to work towards this goeal recently.

I've also tried to differentiate myself by adding features for organizations and businesses in addition to individuals.

Nature groups can use my site to manage their sighting data and promote their own cause for free (most nature groups have difficulty maintaing and collecting wildlife survey data and it typically does not get published or is lost a year after collecting it, its half the reason I started this website).

Eco-tourism businesses (like bird watching eco-tours) can also promote their business by publishing wildlife sightings here too.

Thanks for the feedback !

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Wildlife and Plants Sightings Citizen Science

My feedback is in putting people behind a project. At the moment, I can't see who is behind your project, who are the directors and so on. I feel there's accountability in wildlife reporting so in order for success, I think you'll need to address that.

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Kevin Slagboom
Victoria, BC

I think Kevin's point is a good one.

I would also point out that Citizen science has existed for about 300 years now. Despite more data than ever, Biodiversity loss has never been greater. Is Citizen science really helping anything? Or is it just busy work designed to make conservationists feel better about the tradgedy unfolding in front of them? Maybe we should be putting our efforts towards doing something that actually makes a positive difference?

Guy L. Monty
Parksville, Vancouver Island, BC