Estate Living Magazine Develop - Issue 44 August 2019 | Page 54

C O M M U N I T Y L I V I N G CITIZEN SCIENCE When you look at them closely, the gardens and protected wildlife areas on your estate probably host an astonishing number of different plants, insects, birds, and even reptiles and mammals. Your observations about the natural world around you can be enormously helpful to scientists – and collecting data can be a lot of fun, and a great way of building your community, too. More than the buzzword of the day, biodiversity is the secret that keeps us going. Defined by Stuart L. Pimm* as ‘the variety of life found in a place on Earth or, often, the total variety of life on Earth,’ the concept of biodiversity also implies all the various cogs on the gears (niches in biology-speak) that keep healthy ecosystems going. But biodiversity is also an indication of ecosystem success or collapse. Take the bees out of an environment, for example, and see what happens, which is why measuring biodiversity becomes vitally important in this rapidly changing world of ours; it helps us understand where we’re going, and how we might prevent the looming planetary disaster we’re currently facing. The enormous scale of the task of measuring biodiversity, though, is often beyond the reach of even the best-funded science. But this is where citizen science comes in. What is citizen science? Citizen scientists are ordinary people like us who choose to spend some of their time recording their observations in nature, and sharing them with each other, and with qualified scientists working on specific research projects. It’s a great way of enjoying the outdoors, making a (perhaps small but nevertheless significant) contribution to conservation, and of learning about the world around us. And, since so many residential estates have been designed to make the best of the country’s astonishing diversity, projects to record sightings in your estate’s wild-lands or wetlands, or even on its golf course or in its landscaped gardens, would seem to be a perfect fit for HOAs that are serious about protecting our planet – and for those trying to build communities. Become a citizen scientist South Africa is blessed with a very active, very highly regarded scientific community, but science is not restricted to people with relevant degrees. Many researchers welcome input from the public through a huge number of fascinating and exciting projects that depend on public input. Some may be short term, some may be seasonal, and some become almost permanent. Birders are probably the most long-standing of citizen scientists, but anyone can do it – and you don’t even really need to know what you’re looking at.