The involvement of people and communities in conservation projects, such as the Karen Mogensen Reserve, is necessary to achieve true success for the benefit of nature.
One strategy that is being used more and more is Citizen Science, that is, people who don’t need to have any type of university education or extensive knowledge in the area, but who can take small actions to collect data that can be useful for scientific research process on a much larger scale.
The Citizen Science has been strengthened by the use and development of technologies such as cell phones and mobile applications. With these technologies, it's possible to take photographs, record trail routes, capture GPS points and a wealth of information that is very useful for conservation process throughout the world. Another important feature is that the information and
data generated with Citizen Science are freely accessible and are usually made available on the web so that anyone interested can use this information for different purposes.
In the Karen Mogensen Reserve, citizen science is applied to the process of knowledge and identification of the biodiversity present in the nearly 1000 hectares that make up our reserve. Currently we have a robust database with information about the birds present in the Karen Mogensen Reserve in the eBird application (Karen Mogensen Reserve, P, CR - eBird Hotspot) of the Ornithological Laboratory of Cornell University, USA. Despite this, the eBird application is limited only to the recording of birds; therefore, at the beginning of 2022, a biodiversity registration project with citizen science was created, the iNaturalist application.
iNaturalist is an application where people share observations off any living organism with photographs or sound recordings. In iNaturalist, there is a community of users who will help you identify the most accurate taxonomic level possible for your observation. This project is a great way to take verifiable and geo referenced information of all types of biodiversity present in the Karen Mogensen Reserve area and the only thing necessary to be part of it, is to have a cell phone which can take pictures, create a user in the application and share all your observations.
Currently, from the Karen Mogensen Reserve, we promote that our visitors such as groups of people from nearby communities participating in environmental education workshops, tourist who visit us from all over the world or professionals in nature science, can share their observations with us.
We invite you to visit us and contribute with the generation of data to know our biodiversity. You can visit our citizen science project at Reserva Karen Mogensen · iNaturalist and if you are looking for more information about iNaturalist, please visit A Community for Naturalists · iNaturalist.
Note: No animal or insect is ever hurt or killed for research in the Karen Mogensen Reserve.