NatureWatch NZ in schools

Today we're at the BioLive conference of New Zealand biology teachers. We'll be demonstrating the potential of NatureWatch NZ in schools and getting teacher feedback on what they would like us to develop to help them. Our workshop at the conference is being led by our education coordinator Shane Orchard, from the board of our charitable trust, and Marie McDonald, a current Lincoln University Master of Science student and trained teacher.

You can see the slides of Shane and Marie's presentation here. We'd welcome any feedback in the comments about how you think NatureWatch NZ could best fit into New Zealand schools.


Our work scoping out the use of NatureWatch NZ in schools is kindly funded by the Brian Mason Science and Technical Trust.

Celebrating 20,000 observations in 8 months since launch

It's time to get the sausage rolls out of the oven and the champagne out of the fridge. NatureWatch NZ just surged past its 20,000th observation added since it launched on 27 August 2012. It seems like just over a couple of months ago that NatureWatch past our 10,000 observation milestone. Oh wait. It was!

Our 20,000th observation was of an as yet unidentified spider in a web on a barberry, the 47th observation added by Charles Fryett.

Our online community is growing strongly with those 20,000 observations coming from 399 observers (almost twice the number of people who added the first 10,000). They have added observations of an impressive 3,553 taxa (taxa includes species and higher taxa like genus and family when a species has not been identified). NatureWatch NZ now contains 22,324 photos, attached to 15,013 observations. We're fast becoming an online treasure chest of NZ biodiversity observations, including more of the first photos of some species ever added to the internet (as found with Google searches).

NatureWatch NZ is now a vibrant online community for identifying and discussing New Zealand natural history. And it's not just people observing and commenting on observations. In the past month, 8,909 unique visitors made 107,776 page views. That means "a lot" in web stats language, for a biodiversity website. And those web stats are growing steadily. We're really pleased at how well the new website is being used this soon after our transition from our clunky legacy NZBRN website.

It's a great start, and still just the tip of the iceberg for what we can all contribute to knowledge of NZ nature.

 

NatureWatch NZ on Radio New Zealand National

You can have a listen to two of NatureWatch NZ's founders, Colin Meurk and Jon Sullivan, talk about the project on Radio New Zealand National. This was part of Veronica Meduna's show, Our Changing World, and aired on Thursday 28 March 2013. Jon and Colin talked with Veronica about how NatureWatch NZ works and its aspirations for better connecting Kiwis to nature.

The hunt for the toatoa gall mite

Here's an interesting challenge for everyone on NatureWatch NZ from entomologist Nicholas Martin. Nicholas is the creator of the Plant-SyNZ website of the insect herbivores on New Zealand plants. He's an expert on invertebrate herbivores, especially galling species. And he's found something surprising in Auckland and is keen for your help.

The toatoa bud gall mite, Aceria victoriae (Acari: Eriophyidae), lives on the common native plant, toatoa (or shrubby haloragis), Haloragis erecta (Haloragaceae). The mite was first discovered in a greenhouse at Victoria University, Wellington in 1956 and named and described by Graeame Ramsay in 1958. (Here's the holotype specimen at Te Papa museum.) Remarkably, it was not seen again, until Nicholas found it in 2012 in Auckland, despite his spending decades in Auckland documenting invertebrates feeding on native plants.



Nicholas first found bud galls on toatoa in October 2012 at Whatipu on the southwest tip of the Waitakere Ranges. He found them again in December, this time in the heart of urban Auckland in a native reserve in St Helliers.

The host plant is common in native bush, and the galls are obvious to a trained eye, so why is it so rare in Auckland? And where has it been all these years? Is it more common elsewhere in the country? This is an opportunity for other naturalists in New Zealand to see if they can find the toatoa bud gall mite.

The galls are easily recognisable (see the photos with Nicholas's observations at Whatipu and St. Helliers). The galls are red. Toatoa flowers and fruit are normally green, but may be red, so you need to look closely at the shoot with suspected galls to make sure they are not red fruit or flower buds.

If you find what you think are toatoa bud galls, please add your observations to our new project, the Hunt for the toatoa gall mite. Please be sure to include photo(s) with your observations. Nicholas would also appreciate a specimen if you're interested. And if you find some toatoa and there are no galls on it, that would be very useful to know too. In this case, you can enter an observation of the species and tick the "Sought but not found" box.



Good hunting!

View more observations from Hunt for the Toatoa bud gall mite on NatureWatch NZ »

Using NatureWatch NZ in a university classroom

Since 2011, Lincoln University's Biological Diversity class (Ecol202) has run the Great Canterbury Butterfly Hunt. As one of their nature journal assignments, each student counts butterflies in a simple, standardised way in one garden and one wild place. As a class, we can then figure out in more detail the kinds of habitats and places our butterflies most like. By doing this every year, and making it public through NatureWatch NZ, we are setting up baseline from which changes in butterfly numbers can be detected.

At the end of summer, each student spends one 20-minute period on a warm sunny day counting butterflies in their garden, and another 20-minutes doing the same in a wild place. They note the maximum and minimum number of individuals of each butterfly species they see within and beyond 10 m of where they stand. They photograph as many of the species as they can. They also record and photograph the presence of any host plants of butterfly caterpillars, and record and photograph the flowers that any butterflies are visiting at the site.

This is the first year that we've had NatureWatch NZ available for the butterfly count. It's made things much easier than having to deal with 60 to 70 student spreadsheets. We set up a project on NatureWatch NZ, which all the students joined and used for this year's observations.

View more observations from Ecol202: Great Canterbury Butterfly Hunt on NatureWatch NZ »

Importantly, the assignment is assessed on the ability of students to create a useful dataset. That means they lose no marks if they cannot identify a species, so long as they provide sufficient notes and photographs to allow someone else to identify it. We encouraged them to use the "ID Please" function in NatureWatch NZ whenever they were unsure of an identification. This worked out really well as often someone else on NatureWatch NZ had already made the correct identification by the time we marked the observation.

Another handy thing about NatureWatch NZ for this kind of exercise is the way it deals with location privacy. Students, if they wish, can choose to publicly obscure their locations to a 10 km radius or make them private. Perhaps they don't want everyone in the class knowing exactly where they live. When they do this, the exact locations are hidden from everyone except the Butterfly Hunt project managers (in this case, me and our tutor Nathan). All projects work this way, and people are warned by NatureWatch NZ when they join and add observations to projects. It's a really useful balance.

I've also been uploading the past years' observations into the project using NatureWatch NZ's handy CSV spreadsheet upload function, and then editing the relevant observations to add photos. Soon, we'll have all three years of butterfly counts publicly available and archived on NatureWatch NZ. That will be a record of local butterfly diversity that will only get more valuable with time.

Imagine how much more we'd know if every university, polytech, and high school was doing something like this each year, throughout the country. Imagine if they'd all been doing it for decades. We wouldn't be wondering whether or not NZ butterflies were declining. We'd know so, and in enough detail to describe the conditions associated with the worst declines. (The Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust is busy working to achieve this vision too.)

As part of the class exercise, I prepared the following video tutorial on using NatureWatch NZ. I expect it will be of general interest to people new to NatureWatch NZ (like last month's video tutorial on how to upload kereru observations). Note that the details we added to the tags of each observation will very soon be able to be added directly into custom fields, part of the next NatureWatch NZ feature upgrade.

NatureWatch NZ tutorial on adding observations of butterflies and their associated plants from Jon Sullivan on Vimeo.

I'll blog at a later time about what all these observations are telling us about butterflies. For now, I hope it's a useful example of how NatureWatch NZ can be used in a university classroom to collate and error-check observations, build students' natural history knowledge, and do so in a way that contributes to our shared knowledge of New Zealand biodiversity.

A video tutorial on adding kererū counts to NatureWatch NZ

Following on from our recent blog post on this year's kererū count, here's an excellent tutorial video from Laura Molles, of Lincoln University and Kaupapa Kererū. Laura walks you through all the steps for using NatureWatch NZ to record your observations of kererū (New Zealand wood pigeon). While the video is directed at people involved in this year's Banks Peninsula kererū count, it applies equally well to the national kererū count. Thanks, Laura, for making this.


Links:

• Add an observation to the Kaupapa Kererū Banks Peninsula kererū count
• Kaupapa Kererū
• Add an observation to the national kererū count using NatureWatch NZ
• Forest&Bird's kererū count page for kids
• Kererū Discovery (to learn more about how to help kererū)

Count that kererū!

NatureWatch NZ is joining forces this year with Forest & Bird's Kiwi Conservation Club, Kererū Discovery and Banks Peninsula's Kaupapa Kererū, to count as many kererū (New Zealand wood pigeons) as we can. We're asking everyone (and that means you!) to get out and look for kererū from 24 February to 4 March this year. And you don't need to stop. By all means keep on counting afterwards.

Why count kererū?
Because they big, beautiful, iconic birds that are declining in numbers in parts of New Zealand. We need to know more about where they are doing well and where they are not, and why, to better understand how to look after them. Plus, they are really important as dispersers of our largest-seeded native trees, and of long-standing cultural importance to Maori (and admired by New Zealanders generally). Together, we can collect the observations needed to keep a close eye on New Zealand's kererū.

Do you want to keep it simple?
When you join this year's kererū count, you've got a couple of options. If you like to keep things nice and simple, but just a little bit less useful, you can jump straight to Forest & Bird's Kiwi Conservation Club kererū count webpage. This site is targeted at kids and asks for everyone to note down when and where they see kererū, how many they see, and what the birds were doing. All their counts are archived later on NatureWatch NZ using just the first name of each observer (you can explore all the 2011 counts in the NatureWatch NZ project, Count that kererū!.

Or, you can make your counts even more useful
If you would like to add some more details to your counts, including photos of the birds or the plants they were feeding on, you should add your observations straight to NatureWatch NZ's Count that kererū! project, and, if you're on Banks Peninsula, to the Kaupapa Kererū Banks Peninsula Kereru Community Count project.

On these projects we encourage you to add the following tags and other details to your observations:

• "observation type: casual" for when you see kererū while out doing other things.
• "observation type: search" for when you count a kererū while out specifically looking for kererū

• When you have specifically looked for kererū and not found any, please enter this as an observation with the tag "observation type: search" and the "Sought but not found" box checked. "Sought but not found" is in the "click for more details..." section when you add observations.

• If you were out looking for kererū, please also note how long you were searching. It's most helpful to do this by adding duration to your observation's tags, e.g., "duration: 30min"
• If you were walking about rather than stationary, you can add a radius to your site on the map by adding a number in metres to Accuracy under "Where were you?".

(We're busy adding drop down lists and custom fields and other shiny things to NatureWatch NZ to make entering these details simpler in future, but unfortunately these won't quite be ready for the 2013 kererū count.)

Adding these extra details to your observations makes it much easier for scientists to figure out how our kererū populations are doing. Knowing whether or not you saw kererū when you were out looking for them is much more informative than just noting down where you see them. Why? Because it clearly shows us the places where kererū are absent or rarely seen. Otherwise, we don't know whether there are no kererū in an area or just that no kererū counter visited the area to look.

We also encourage you to add observations of the plants (fruit, flowers, or leaves) that you see kererū feeding on. You can add these as separate observations to the Count that kererū! project too, after you have entered a kererū observation. You can turn on "ID Please" if you'd like help identifying the plants. All NatureWatch NZ webpage links are stable so you can copy and paste the web link (URL) from your plant observation webpage into the description of your kererū observation if you wish.


Happy counting!

Live feed of observations from Count that kererū! on NatureWatch NZ »

View more observations from Count that kererū! on NatureWatch NZ »