Spring has arrived and nature is waking up. This challenge is about documenting wild animals and wild plants, in other words about studying the biodiversity in our direct environment.

By Biodiversity monitoring or observation, we mean the gathering of information about the occurrence of a wild plant, a wild animal or a mushroom in a certain place at a certain time.

The application called iNaturalist allows you to easily gather all the relevant Information (what, where and when) and to share it as you wish.

This challenge is entirely interactive and runs with the application, by way of which you will also be able to receive help by experts around the world, with the determination of the species you will have observed and of which you will have taken pictures.

It is important that you document many wild plants and animals and therefore you have to:

• Make close observations in your front- and back yard.
• Observe birds from your balcony or your window.
• You might find interesting insects near or on your flowers on the balcony.
• Wild plants or flowers sometimes grow in cracks in walls or front entrances, have a close look.
• Look for a spider or a fly that got lost in your house.

 

How can I participate?

If you are 13 years or older you will have two weeks  (until 22nd May 2020) to participate in this challenge and observe rare species.

These three consecutive steps are important:

1. Register with iNaturalist

Attention! You must be 13 years old in order to be able to create an account with iNaturalist.

As a start you can download the free iNatruralist-App:

• iOs: Link
• Android: Link
• or you visit the iNaturlist-website: Link

After that you can create your account with iNaturalist, you will only need an email adress and to choose your username and password. This video explains how to create this account.

It is also possible to register with a Facebook or Google account.

With this information you can log yourself into the app or the website.

In order for all the participants to the challenge to find themselves together you must find the “project” called Natur Doheem Challenge 2020 (Link) in iNaturalist. Then you have to click “join”. This step is explained in this video.

 

2. Register for the challenge on Schouldoheem

Please write  an email about your participation immediatly to challenge@script.lu and give us your username with iNaturalist, as well as your IAM and your student email address and your home address. This will enable us to contact the winners directly and to send them their gifts.

 

3. Action!

Once you are logged in to iNaturalist and correctly registered with the Proejct Natur Doheem Challenge 2020 (Link), you will be able to  upload your observations in the form of pictures. You can upload new pictures as well as older ones of wild species that you might already have taken earlier.

The following videos will show you how that works.

• How to upload a new observation (picture): Link
• How to upload an old picture: Link
• How to upload observations via webbrowser: Link

All elements that are not wild (for example cultivated flowers or domestic animals) must be identified as such. This video shows you how to do this. Please do not take pictures of dogs, cats or people.

 

Winner / Awards

You can follow the newest developments of the challenge and see all your pictures with your observations live on Natur Doheem Challenge 2020 on  iNaturalist: Link.

Participants can win a mixture of seeds for growing wild plants. And the top-observers in the different categories will win books on nature and wildlife in Luxembourg.

The Musée national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) is the manager of this challenge on iNaturalist and will assist us in the determination and validation of the observations that will be uploaded. A big thanks to the MNHN-team for this!