#509: Go Jauntly into your Naturehood

Via LinkedIn.

Go Jauntly has teamed up with the National Trust.

#465: Bugs Matter Survey - take part

Until the end of September you can take part in the annual Bugs Matter survey to measure the presence of insects. This uses a smartphone app now, rather than a paper template which used to be the case. Contribute to this citizen science initiative.

The Bugs Matter citizen science survey is an important initiative measuring insect splats on vehicle number plates as a marker of insect abundance. In previous survey years, with the valuable contributions of citizen scientists across the UK, we have made significant strides in understanding the challenges facing our insect populations.

This year, we need your help, once again, to build on our knowledge and make our impact even greater. Sharing the findings from your journeys will help us understand more about our insect populations, as growing evidence highlights their declines on a global scale.

Your participation in this nature survey is vital for us to monitor population trends, address causes of insect loss, halt and reverse them.

This is how the survey works:

 

And here's why it matters...

#463: Wildling App - launches today

The OCR blog has a post from Ant Rawlins.

He talks about the new Wildling app which launches today.

Wildling officially launches nationwide on 9 July, backed by some of the UK’s leading conservation organisations and individuals, including the RSPB, the Marine Conservation Society, Forestry England, and advisors such as Deborah Meaden, Ben Goldsmith, and Sir Tim Smit.

It’s a free app designed to make finding and enjoying nature simpler for everyone. Whether you’re in a city, suburb, or rural area, Wildling helps users discover local nature, explore ideas for getting outdoors, and find calming, inspiring content that can develop confidence and connection with the natural world.

It’s suitable for families, first-timers, educators, and anyone looking to reconnect with nature, and feel better for doing so.

You can download the Wildling app for free from our website.

Wildling has been designed to make it easier for people to engage with the natural world, and that has clear value across many areas of education.

By helping students explore nature where they live, the app can support learning across a wide range of subjects. It’s not about replacing lessons, but enhancing them with real-world experience.

This joins apps such as Melissa Harrison's Encounter app in providing people with a chance to identify and record their encounters with nature, which will be useful for geography as well as for the GCSE Natural History when and if it finally gains approval to be added as a new qualification option.

Thanks to Kerry Sage for the tipoff to the blog post and app.

#435: Apps for plant identification

There are two key apps for those who want to identify plants. I've already mentioned iNaturalist, but I've also had a play with the PlantNet app.

This is free to download for iPhone and Android.

I tried it in the gardens of the building where my classroom is located. The app was good at letting me know what plant I was looking at.

#304: MerlinID for bird identification

Merlin ID is a rather good new free smartphone app which is ideal for anyone who wants to know what birds they are listening to. Download the app to begin with.

When you are out on a walk, choose SOUND ID and press the green button.

Merlin identifies bird sounds using breakthroughs in machine learning technology to recognize species based on spectrograms—visual representations of sounds. For Merlin to learn to recognize a species by sound, we use audio recordings from the Macaulay Library that include a variety of sounds for each species to “train” Merlin.

Your smartphone's microphone will be used to record sounds in real time, and as the software identifies a match with a bird that is singing, it will appear on the screen, and you can compare the suggestion with what you are hearing.

Here's what it picked up on a walk I took yesterday's evening. 

As the bird's name popped up I heard it's call as separate from the others, which helped me potentially learn it in the future.

Each sound file can be uploaded to help Merlin ID 'learn'.

As the main website says:

Sound ID is currently available for 1,000+ species. You can view a list of all species covered by Sound ID here. Sound ID will be expanded in the future to include species worldwide, but to do that, our team needs a minimum of 150 sound recordings for each species to train Merlin to recognize their sounds. You can help us add new species to Merlin by recording the birds in your area and uploading them with your eBird checklists.

This will be a wonderful app for those who are planning to investigate bird habitats and particular species.

It's currently FREE but I wonder whether there are plans to start charging over time as the app gets more accurate.