Commencing tomorrow, National Science Week is celebrating its 20th birthday, and it’s your opportunity to help do science! There are numerous ways that users of the ALA can participate in National Science Week activities:
- Add your sightings of plants or animals directly to the ALA.
- Contribute your sightings to one of the many citizen science projects currently happening in different areas of Australia through our project finder tool.
- Be part of the volunteering team at DigiVol.
- Get involved in the Australian Citizen Science Association.
- Take the kids along to the new Collections exhibit at the CSIRO Discovery Centre, where you can find out more about CSIRO’s collections including the ALA.
- If you have skills in identifying organisms, why not join BowerBird and help other people identify their sightings.
- Check out our ‘Image a Day’ posts on Facebook.
- Join in Great Australian Biodiversity Challenge brought to you by Questagame in partnership with Australia’s botanic gardens, by taking part in one of the Bushland Nature Walks (https://www.scienceweek.net.au/bushland-nature-walk-questagame-challenge).
- Follow the Whale Shark Race around the world, satellite tracking of the world’s largest fish (https://zoatrack.org/whalesharkrace).
Citizen science is a very important source of data about biodiversity to the ALA. Data and insights gained through the efforts of citizen scientists can be as valuable as those obtained by scientists working in academia, natural history collections, government agencies and business, and the ALA welcomes more collaborators.