#673: Countryfile calendar voting

Today's the day that the voting took place for next year's BBC Countryfile calendar.

If you're reading this in time, you can vote for your favourite for the final 12 chosen images.

The theme is "Signs of the Seasons".

Vote for your favourite here.

#598: Biodiversity Heritage Library - an amazing resource

The Biodiversity Heritage Library was featured in The Guardian yesterday.

There is a very large Flickr library of images which are scanned from the original documents and arranged in albums. These are from expeditions such as Erebus, and into the Antarctic.

There are some excellent images from historical manuscripts.

As well as published biodiversity literature and journals, there are letters, illustrations, climate records, field diaries, ecosystem profiles, distribution records and manuscripts containing the original collecting stories of a particular species or detailing voyages of discovery.

The story was linked to a suggestion that AI might help save endangered plants.

Check the website of the library for more details.

What are your favourite albums in the collection?

#503: Local Distinctiveness

Common Ground has a "local distinctiveness" section to their website.

With the increasing homogenisation of the landscape and culture and the rise of AI slop, it's important to cherish those 'local' differences which can be explored using local fieldwork.

#59: OCR Graphic

While checking for relevant Tweets (I do a monthly search to see what people may have been saying about the new qualification) I came across this OCR image that I hadn't seen before. It's a useful image to use perhaps in future.

The choice of images here may also be interesting as it may show the short of direction that OCR is looking at... what they consider to be Natural History-related images...

#5: Natural History Images - free to use

I've started to put together a set / album of images that may be of interest for those teaching the new GCSE specification and need some copyright free images for use in resources / web pages etc. 

They are all general Natural History images with forests, woodland, farms, estuaries etc. I will add some more when I get the time to browse back through the 37 000 images that are on my main Flickr page.

You can find them on my Flickr account area via the link here.

Feel free to contribute your own images by adding them as comments below or getting in touch with me via Twitter (@GeoBlogs)

I shall continue to add images to this folder in the year(s) to come. 

They are all shared under a CC license.

Images: Alan Parkinson, and shared under CC license.

Top: Castle Acre church through the morning mist and a pea crop, Norwich

Bottom: Poppies between Great Massingham and Grimston, Norwich

#3: GCSE Natural History Pinterest board

As always with projects, I have started a new Pinterest board and will be saving relevant images to it as they emerge in my social media scrolling and time spent researching.

Pinterest is a good way of storing images which appear in your online browsing. A button can be added to your web browser's toolbar, so that hovering over any image gives the option to add the image to a Pinterest board of your choosing. These boards can be made collaborative as well.

These can then be used in lesson planning and dropped into documents nearer the time. 

Update November 2023

Now up over 130 images on the board.