NNHS along with Keystone kicked off a Seasonwatch workshop, the first of its kind, to bring Seasonwatch to the Nilgiris. The day long workshop was held in the Keystone campus on 9th March, 2020. Our participants were a mixed group of 9 – 3 teachers from a school and a college in Kotagiri and 6 barefoot ecologists from our Keystone work areas of Sigur and Hasanur. A few Keystone staff from Biodiversity Management program and Field Courses and Research Group were also part of running the workshop.
Swati Sidhu of Seasonwatch was the facilitator for the workshop with tamizh translation done by Sharada Ramadass. The day was filled with games – indoors and outdoors, but all focused on nature, environment, trees and how they behave to changes in their environment. Seasonwatch is an India-wide citizen science program ( https://www.seasonwatch.in/ ) that encourages people of all ages to go out observe and monitor their neighbourhood trees to understand patterns and changes pertaining to phenology, which can inform scientific research and provide crucial data for long term climate change related studies.
While keeping it fun and engaging, the workshop drew attention to key concepts – of importance of monitoring data, benefits of long term data, necessity of rigour in data collection and sampling, to name a few. The participants were taken through a presentation on Seasonwatch, followed by its usefulness in terms of analysing and making sense of data. They were then introduced to the datasheet and how to collect data and participated in outdoor activities that enabled them to understand data collection and techniques.
The participants were then shown how the data could be uploaded, the various access mechanisms (web, mobile app) before wrapping up for the day. The next order of events is to be able to identify trees that can be monitored by the school students and the barefoot ecologists in their surroundings for long term and get started! We hope to have more people participate in future workshops, so get in touch if you might be interested!
(by Sharada Ramadass)
