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.