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Win prizes for taking wildlife images in your school yard and uploading them to the ALA!

To celebrate National Science Week (11-19 August 2018), we will be running our Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) School Biodiversity Image Competition again.

What you need to do:

  • Take images of plants, animals or fungi in your schoolyard

    An image of a black and white ibis on the ground next to some play equipment in a park
    This picture of an Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis molucca) isn’t particularly clear. Your images don’t have to be great quality, just identifiable.
  • Upload your images to the ALA using these instructions: How to log a sighting
  • Be sure to add the teacher’s name and school name in the Attribution and Notes section

Prizes:

Each day of National Science Week we will choose the best image taken in a schoolyard to feature on our Atlas of Living Australia Facebook page. Each of these featured images will be in the running for an ALA prize package, including:

  • ALA branded merchandise
  • An ALA citizen science project page set up in your school’s name using BioCollect. BioCollect is the ALA’s field data capture tool that allows users to set up their own tailored pages suited to their specific needs. Whether you’re running a bug blitz, or counting and identifying birds, your school’s own citizen science project page will make adding your future sightings easier and will keep all sightings together in one data set. 

Benefits of using ALA in the classroom

Recording the biodiversity in your schoolyard is a great first step in helping students understand the importance of biodiversity in building healthy ecosystems and supporting resilient environments. 

A close up image of two plover birds, common visitors to school yards
Masked Plovers (Vanellus (Lobipluvia) miles) are common visitors to school ovals across eastern Australia. Image by Peter Davey.

This is also a great way to showcase the success of your school’s existing habitat development areas, like frog bogs, wildlife corridors or butterfly gardens, or to gather data to plan for something new in the future.   

So teachers! We are letting you know early so you can encourage your students to take images of plants, animals or fungi in the schoolyard. Any images uploaded by teachers between now and the start of National Science Week will be entered into the competition.

The competition rules are simple:

  • The image must be taken in or close to the school yard and logged directly into the ALA by teachers (please don’t email us your photo – log in and do it yourself)
  • No students can appear in the images if they can be recognised (hands holding (safely!) or pointing to something is fine)
  • The teacher’s name and school name must be attached to the image (use the Attribution and Notes sections when you’re adding the image on Record your sighting)

Our School Biodiversity Image Competition will be running alongside our popular Australian species ‘Image per day’ Facebook promotion during National Science Week.