CSIRO hosted two citizen science bushfire forums, one on 14 February 2020 and the second on 30 March 2020. These forums brought together stakeholders across multiple sectors including research, state and commonwealth government, non-government organisations, industry and citizen science to begin discussions about how to best work together.
Objectives included the sharing of ideas for how research and citizen science sectors could better partner around common goals, and to identify actions that could be taken immediately to support the sector through the current bushfire response and recovery phase. The scope of the forum was not limited to biodiversity, but also included air, water and the built environment.
The group explored the need to collate and share resources through common approaches and to ensure that all emergent data becomes available in Australia's national data repositories such as the ALA, to support effective landscape scale monitoring and response.
Recommendations
The forums resulted in the development of formal recommendations PDF (3 MB)that will be used to support continued discussions with government and key stakeholders. The goal is to establish a more enduring national approach to harnessing the capability and willingness of citizen scientist to partner with our research sector to improve the delivery of research-ready data.
Contributing organisations
- Australian National University, Fenner School of Environment and Society
- Atlas of Living Australia
- Australian Citizen Science Association
- Australian Museum
- Australian Space Agency
- Australian Trust for Conservation Volunteers (SA/ Vic/ NSW/ Tas)
- Birdlife Australia
- Border Ranges Alliance
- Bushfire Recovery Victoria
- Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria
- Council of Heads of Australian Faunal Collections
- CSIRO
- Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment (Cth)
- Department of Environment and Water, South Australia
- Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, Victoria (Cth)
- Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (Cth)
- DigiVol
- Earth Guardians
- Ecological Society of Australia
- Geoscience Australia
- Greening Australia
- Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)
- Naturemapr
- Office of the Chief Scientist (Cth)
- Office of the Chief Scientist, Queensland
- Queensland Museum
- Queensland University of Technology
- Questacon
- Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN)
- University of Adelaide
- University of New South Wales