As part of the Citizen Science Hour for Biodiversity Collections Webinar Series, the focus of this event is "Opportunities Provided by the 2021 Global Citizen Science Month, including City Nature Challenge and WeDigBio."
Register for this event on EventBrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/citizen-science-hour-for-biodiversity-collections-tickets-136478044505?aff=ebdssbeac).
In just a couple of years, Global Citizen Science Month (April) has grown from a single day of events, to a coordinated effort supported by SciStarter, the National Library of Medicine, Arizona State University, the Citizen Science Association, Science Friday, National Geographic and many other collaborators from around the world. Global Citizen Science Month encompasses online events and opportunities to contribute to projects from home. And April 2021 is just around the corner! It’s time to prepare. Learn more about this via https://CitizenScienceMonth.org.
Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections, or WeDigBio, is a global data campaign, virtual science festival, and local outreach opportunity, all rolled into one. The annual, 4-day WeDigBio events mobilize participants to create digital data about biodiversity specimens, including fish in jars, plants on sheets, insects on pins, and fossils in drawers. During a typical WeDigBio event, some participants are at onsite events hosted by museums, field stations, universities, science classrooms, or other organizations. Those onsite events provide opportunities for research talks or other interactions with those using the newly created data to benefit science and society. Other participants are distributed individually around the world. For those, we offer a virtual meeting space, which contains live feeds from some of the onsite events and provides another way to interact with scientists and others. WeDigBio 2021 events will occur from April 8–11 and October 14–17. We are excited to schedule the April event during the Global Citizen Science Month. https://wedigbio.org/
The City Nature Challenge is organized by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and California Academy of Sciences. Cities around the world will be competing to see who can make the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage the most people April 30-May 3 of 2021.
Speakers for this webinar include:
Libby Ellwood — Global Communications Manager, iDigBio, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida
Lila Higgins — Senior Manager, Community Science, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Caroline Nickerson — Program Manager, SciStarter
Alison Young — Co-Director, Citizen Science, California Academy of Sciences
MORE ABOUT THIS SERIES:
This webinar series is dedicated to catalyzing excellence in citizen science that engages biodiversity collections. Citizen science is public engagement in scientific research, and it has the valuable potential to simultaneously advance research, science literacy and participation, and project sustainability, among other goals. Biodiversity collections curate about 3 billion specimens (insects on pins, fossils in drawers, fish in jars, plants on sheets, etc.) worldwide, and these are critically important to research that puts present day diversity and distribution in context and models the future of Earth's biome. These collections range widely in their institutional settings, including museums, botanical gardens, universities, field stations, government research centers, and other places. The webinar series is being organized by iDigBio, the US NSF's National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections.
While iDigBio's mission focuses on specimen digitization, data sharing, and data use, this series is intended to encompass all opportunities that citizen science might offer to the collections community and complementary sectors of that community's institutions. The series is targeted at an audience of collections curators, researchers, educators, and affiliates.
The need for something like this webinar series was recognized during the 2020 Biodiversity Summit that iDigBio hosted for the leadership of projects funded by NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program. A follow-up survey of the community led to a winnowing of 22 potential topics down to a set of high-priority topics that we are aiming to schedule into two parts: the first, more general cluster between January and May; the second, tool-focused cluster between May and September. The webinar series might continue beyond September, based on audience interest.
We have assembled a slate of distinguished speakers on these target topics, many from outside the collections community. A more extensive schedule, short bios of the speakers, webinar recordings, and links to additional resources on each topic will be assembled on the webinar's wiki page (https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Webinar_Series:_Citizen_Science_Hour_for_Biodiversity_Collections).
**By attending iDigBio’s online events, you accept that the event will be recorded and posted for later asynchronous viewing.**