From 27th to 30th of April all people living in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona are called to participate in the most important biodiversity event in the world, the City Nature Challenge. For the first time, Barcelona has organized a great event under the name of Biomarathon.
From 27th to 30th of April all people living in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona are called to participate in the most important biodiversity event in the world, the City Nature Challenge. For the first time, Barcelona has organized a great event under the name of Biomarathon.
The international initiative was born in 2016 in the United States, when the Academy of Sciences of California (San Francisco) competed with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles to see which of the two cities found more life in its urban environment. Two years later, the friendly competition has taken the international leap with 68 participating cities. These include the spanish cities Barcelona, Madrid and Cádiz. The winning city will be the one with more participants, who have found more biodiversity and more different species. This event is an extraordinary injection of citizen data into the global biodiversity databases.
For this event, CREAF and the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) have encouraged dozens of entities to participate, with the collaboration of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, the Barcelona city council and ten more municipalities of the entire Metropolitan area. The Provincial Council of Barcelona, the Collserola Park itself, or the Barcelona Zoo, among others, have also collaborated. All together have scheduled sea and mountain activities during these dates, and have encouraged citizens to go out and look for biodiversity in and around their city.
Anyone can participate, sign up for an activity or look for biodiversity on their own. The objective is to find and photograph the maximum number of species possible during the four days and to hang them in Natusfera, the platform chosen to post the data. "We estimate that, among all the people who participate, we will photograph and upload to Natusfera more than 20,000 living beings. every way of life counts: birds, butterflies, trees, fungi, mosses, lichens, mammals, reptiles ... Even the cultivated plant species or domesticated animals count ", say the CREAF and ICM organizers.
After the observation marathon, three days will be dedicated to identify and validate all new species uploaded to Natusfera. It will be very easy, Natusfera already has a virtual community of expert naturalists who will help identify the species and will help correcting other identifications. You do not have to be an expert to participate in the Biomarathon, the most important thing is to open your eyes and prepare your camera!
Know urban biodiversity to raise awareness
"Natusfera is like a naturalists social network who share photographs of what they see in nature, identify the species and validate the photographs so they can be used in scientific projects," said Bernat Claramunt and Jaume Piera, promoters of the platform. The first is a CREAF researcher and professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; the second, a CSIC researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences, two reference centers in ecology, terrestrial and marine, who have promoted this initiative to make clear that citizen data on biodiversity are essential in the scientific world.
Because behind Natusfera, or Biomarathon, there are scientific objectives. "We want people to learn as much as possible about the life that surrounds them, to discover the variety of species they have at home and to have a tool that motivates them to share it with other people. But we also want their observations to be useful and reusable to monitor and better manage urban biodiversity", they comment. Therefore, once the citizens' data has been validated, they will go to the database of the GBIF Spanish node, the Global Biodiversity Information Infrastructure, which, together with CREAF and the ICM, promotes Natusfera.
More information: http://biomarato.creaf.cat/
Marine biodiversity program
Press release: CREAF