Citizen Science in the time of Coronavirus. The Asian Edition.
Community driven science is a particularly challenging activity in a time of social isolation, but Citizen Science is as important as ever to sort good and bad information in the “infodemic”, teach science to all the school and university students stuck at home, and keep our spirits up. While still practicing social distancing and helping to flatten the curve.
ECSA (the European Citizen Science Association) and ACSA (the Australian Citizen Science Association) have put together handy lists of Citizen science resources from European and Australian perspectives relating to the COVID19 pandemic. Filling this gap here we highlight some of the Asian examples to use technology to unite towards a common goal from the safety and comfort of our own homes. Both through projects where you can contribute information to help tackle the crisis, and ongoing citizen science projects that are able to carry on and keep us occupied while social distancing. With Citizen Science month about to start we also discuss how some of those projects will continue. As good citizen science practitioners we are fans of crowdsourcing, so if there is anything we’ve missed please let us know and we will update this list.
Citizen Science projects continuing in Asia during the coronavirus lockdown
Bird Count India Lockdown Birding Challenge is asking birders stuck inside because of the India lockdown to record the birds around their homes to see if there are changes in their behavior (which has been observed in Beijing).
#bonkerscavengers from the Dog Lab, IISER Kolkata in India is sending out a call for citizen scientists to submit video footage of how scavenging animals are sustaining themselves during this lockdown. Please submit footage to youtube using using #bonkerscavengers in the description, along with specifying the date, time and location.
Corona Israel is an Israeli project to track and monitor Coronavirus outbreak “hotspaces” using citizen science.
HK Coronavirus Cases on Kaggle is encouraging the data science community to hack and find patterns in a publicly curated dataset of coronavirus cases in Hong Kong. Data is also being gathered by Open Source Hong Kong in this GitHub repository.
ISRC (Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID-19) is an Indian scientist-citizen led initiative that has come together to act as scientific interpreters for the public at large.
SAFECAST COVID-19 Testing Map has been put together by our friends from Safecast in Japan (see post) to crowdsource self reported COVID-19 symptom and testing data.
Smartphones4Water Nepal are carrying out their 2020 Monsoon Expedition in the lockdown by promoting rainfall monitoring at home.
TraceTogether is an app launched by the Singapore government that uses a community-driven approach to identify close contacts of users.
Citizen Science Month in the time of Coronavirus
You may have seen from our social media takeover of the CitSciMonth feeds that April is Citizen Science Month, and this still taking place but in-person events are transitioning to virtual events. This includes some of the key Citizen Science events of the year such as CNC and Earth Day.
City Nature Challenge in the time of Coronavirus
After Hong Kong’s extremely successful City Nature Challenges 2018 and 2019, coming second globally in numbers of species observed, we were looking forward to 2020. Unfortunately a competitive, community gathering event is no longer possible with much of the world under social isolation orders and lockdowns. All is not lost, and CNC 2020 will still be going ahead without the competitive aspects. Instead it will embrace the healing power of nature and encourage the collaborative aspect of the CNC. This will allow people to safely document biodiversity in whatever way they can, even from the safety of their own homes. Which has been proven to works very well with previous iNaturalist projects such as The Wild Life of Homes. Participants will be urged to carefully follow public health guidelines provided by your local governments, as they are changing in real-time.
Earth Day 2020 in the time of coronavirus
With so many of the schools closed, there is a big need for interesting and informative home schooling materials. The Earth Day Network has produced a range of quizzes on the Earth — its species, its resources and its threats. There were big plans for events to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original Earth Day next month (see our guest post), but these will unfortunately have to be cancelled. Instead, April 22 will mark the first Digital Earth Day, a global digital mobilization to address the most urgent threats to people and planet. They are also using the situation to be very contemplative at this unusual time, publishing lessons the coronavirus pandemic can teach us about our response to climate change, as well as reading lists of classic books that capture the outdoors even when you’re stuck inside.
We hope everyone stays safe and well, and at this difficult time these examples reminds us of the importance of community and collaboration at a time it is desperately needed.
