New Citizen Science partnership with Zoos Victoria

Staff in CeRDI’s Natural Environment research area, led by Research Associate Robert Milne, have established an eResearch Collaboration with Zoos Victoria to enhance data capture and citizen science engagement for the Zoo’s Fighting Extinction program.

The Fighting Extinction program, which aims to prevent the loss of threatened wildlife, currently includes local and international conservation campaigns and research, as well as public education programs, captive breeding and re-introduction and support of wildlife recovery teams.
 

Victoria Zoo’s Fighting Extinction logo

Through the Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity (VVB) and State Wide Integrated Flora and Fauna Teams (SWIFFT) platforms, Zoos Victoria will be supported to provision, display and visualise data in an open access web-based spatial portal that will create opportunities for further research, education and knowledge exchange.

The project will support Zoos Victoria to collect data for conservation research through interactive citizen science and crowd sourcing web applications in partnership with the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning’s Connecting Community program.

Using innovative web-based technologies, the collaboration aims to enhance the Zoo’s capacity to share knowledge and data, to assess Zoos Victoria data access and usage, to engage the public and conservationists in active project participation and data sharing and to further build connections and relationships between on-the-ground conservationists, researchers and associated professionals as well as the wider community.

For more information with regards to the website's mentioned in the above article, visit the website's below:
State Wide Integrated Flora and Fauna Teams (SWIFFT) - www.swifft.net.au
Visualising Victoria’s Biodiversity (VVB) - www.vvb.org.au
Zoos Victoria Fighting Extinction - www.zoo.org.au/fighting-extinction