Just completed a long outstanding but oh so incredibly repetitive task. iNaturalist is a pretty incredible engagement tool which among other functionality allows you to easily create a ‘project’ in essence a branded filter that pulls out observations based on various things such as location, date, species etc..
The problem is that it is ‘so’ easy you can knock one up in minutes. Add to that i have worked on various engagement projects and supported various others i realised on leaving Merseyside BioBank earlier this year that i had racked up admin responsibilities for around 400 projects(!).
Now i don’t mind helping out with a few, but i also have my own interests and quite frankly they were all getting in the way!
It is more than that however, and i recently attended a webinar with the UK Terrestrial Evidence Partnership of Partnerships (UKTEPoP)1 where the BTO presented on a recently published paper Estimating the carbon footprint of citizen science biodiversity monitoring2
It really brought home how mindful we all really need to be about our work. The BTO research showed the impact of their work through ‘Citizen Science’ was tiny compared to other sectors but at the same time it showed that there was an impact, what of other organisations, other projects? In turn raising the question how can we improve efficiency to minimise wasted effort in gathering the data that we need as a community (there’s probably something in that for the ‘funders’ that insist on supporting redundant/silo projects..).
There’s also rapidly increasing recognition of the environmental impact of running servers… both in terms of processing power for web apps and also server storage.3
The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.
Anyway, it seemed like a good time to get my act in order and remove that digital baggage, a few hundred iNat ‘projects’ and a hundred or so gigabites of cloud storage later I’m feeling a lot tidier. Perhaps have a think about you as an individual, an influencer or an organisation, what do you really need and what could you free up?
We might be working to better biodiversity, the natural environment, the climate but that does not excuse us from having a negative impact.
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