Mick Davis from the City of Kalamunda showed us a new mobile app for use with the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). Called BioCollect, it enables us as citizen scientists to immediately upload photos and other records of living things to the online data bank of the Atlas. The ALA is free, and is open to lay-people as well as scientists. Mick is the Environmental Friends Group Officer in the City of Kalamunda. He has a degree in multidisciplinary science from Curtin University, a passion for short-range endemic invertebrates and has worked in Natural Resource Management throughout WA for the last 15 years.

The ALA, created by CSIRO and currently with 37,000 users, allows people to upload information on any living thing onto a website. The BioCollect app allows anyone to feed information into its high-quality database via their mobile phone. Citizen scientist projects like this are important because there are not enough professional scientists to do all the work that ideally should be done.

Mick urged us to have a go at using this database and its app. Before an excursion, photos of living things found in that location can be uploaded from the ALA website. Click Explore by location and type in your location. You can get a list of all living things or separate lists of plants, birds, invertebrates etc. within a 1km or greater radius of where you are. If you click Show me the records you can, for example, go to the WA Museum website and see vouchered specimens. Another option is to select a Field Guide for a particular area.

To use the app, take a photo of a spider (for example) and click Add a new record. The phone will give the time, date and location, and you answer questions such as ‘How many did you see?’ and ‘Are you confident of the identification?’ Mick is working with the City of Kalamunda on using this app to develop a wildlife inventory for the area—and the Darling Range Branch of our Club is using it similarly.

Mick mentioned a problem which is being debated: Is it best to show the location of a rare species, or to leave those out in order to protect the species? He also pointed out that participation in activities using the ALA and BioCollect, with sharing of expertise, is a great way to stimulate the interest of both children and adults in natural history. It also helps us to understand and manage our natural areas.

Mike Gregson