A coalition-led biodiversity early warning system can take completely different shapes, depending on need. It will grow organically from a small, lean core of pressing needs and adequate datasets, with partners and collaborators co-producing data, trends, models and policy products.
Our partners are strategists, scientists, agency decisionmakers, policy wonks, modelers, data geeks, media and film directors, tribal authorities, public watchdogs, and citizen science groups.
We work with local partners to support their building of a coalition, and then their embarking upon a detailed process to design and prioritize their work.
In times of rapid environmental change and declining government budgets, citizen science is a rising engine of biodiversity observation. People are taking democratic responsibility for tracking environmental change in space and time.
In South Africa's early warning system, the model for our subsequent work, keeping citizen science at the core filled three important aims:
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building democracy and awareness: citizen scientists built awareness and passion for biodiversity, and skills in species identification, capture, photography, monitoring, species demography and phenology.
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enabling interdisciplinary growth and innovation: with strong local and international academic interest, new private/public partnerships, better apps, better decisions.
Ordinary people gather data - take pictures - and upload it directly or at public data 'upload hubs' at schools and public places to participate. This is a democratizing system for tracking biodiversity in space and time, which builds passion, awareness and stewardship, as well as providing important data.
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