Then all the volunteers have to do is what they love to do anyway
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2025 5:21 am
Digitalization allows volunteers to do the fun stuff and relieves them of the unpopular office work. Just four years ago, the MhB's mappers spent as much time at their desks as they did on the test site. What remains is the recording by sight and hearing in the field, and from this year onwards the evaluation is fully automated.
This speeds up the flow of data, avoids typos and saves kilos of paper. It also makes it much easier to recruit volunteers for mapping work.
However, there are signs that there will be a lack of species knowledge in society in the future. In habitats that are highly hidden from view, such as settlements or forests, mapping is largely done by ear. However, the number of people who can reliably assign calls or song fragments to a bird species seems to be decreasing. Therefore, in the medium term, it may be necessary to provide digital support to young mappers.
There are already reasonably useful programs based on artificial intelligence peru consumer email list for recognizing bird calls. BirdNet and others are still far too imprecise for use in the MhB. If the recognition rate improves, it would be quite conceivable to allow volunteers with moderate knowledge of species to participate.
Political decisions are made on the basis of data collected by thousands of volunteers every year. Without their unpaid expertise, a Europe-wide overview of environmental data would hardly be possible. Digitizing the evaluations saves them a lot of work and motivates them to participate. At the same time, the accuracy and thus the meaningfulness of the indicators increases.
The monitoring also reflects the importance of birds in the cultural landscape. The counts of the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) are carried out by volunteers across Europe. However, 2800 field workers are involved in the monitoring in Great Britain, 1300 in Germany and only 200 in Italy.
You can find more exciting topics from the adesso world in our previously published blog posts .
This speeds up the flow of data, avoids typos and saves kilos of paper. It also makes it much easier to recruit volunteers for mapping work.
However, there are signs that there will be a lack of species knowledge in society in the future. In habitats that are highly hidden from view, such as settlements or forests, mapping is largely done by ear. However, the number of people who can reliably assign calls or song fragments to a bird species seems to be decreasing. Therefore, in the medium term, it may be necessary to provide digital support to young mappers.
There are already reasonably useful programs based on artificial intelligence peru consumer email list for recognizing bird calls. BirdNet and others are still far too imprecise for use in the MhB. If the recognition rate improves, it would be quite conceivable to allow volunteers with moderate knowledge of species to participate.
Political decisions are made on the basis of data collected by thousands of volunteers every year. Without their unpaid expertise, a Europe-wide overview of environmental data would hardly be possible. Digitizing the evaluations saves them a lot of work and motivates them to participate. At the same time, the accuracy and thus the meaningfulness of the indicators increases.
The monitoring also reflects the importance of birds in the cultural landscape. The counts of the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) are carried out by volunteers across Europe. However, 2800 field workers are involved in the monitoring in Great Britain, 1300 in Germany and only 200 in Italy.
You can find more exciting topics from the adesso world in our previously published blog posts .