In today’s post we want to discuss citizen science. Last month we celebrated the Global Big Day, an incredible experience of citizen science that had produced an incredible amount of data about birds, their migrations, habitat use and had promoted thousands of conservation initiatives around the world. As a Colombian, the world most diverse country in birds, and despite birds not been the main focus of my career, I had also participated in this incredible effort in past years. However, recent comments and opinions on social media in the country made me reflect on the real purpose of listing animal observations.

Especially, during the last five years, I had seen a general pattern to show these citizen science exercises as some kind of competition between municipalities, departments and even countries that I consider is making more harm than good to the main purpose of these events (i.e. Global Big Day and October Big Day). The participation of citizens and public in these events should be used to promote awareness about the importance of animals, in this case birds, and highlight its threats and open spaces to discuss possible options to reduce those threats. Instead, it seems to become some kind of show in which people just compete to see who can see more animals than others.I wonder if we as scientists are also forgetting that these events are opportunities to show communities how important their ways of living are and how some of the practices they have done traditionally contribute to the number of animals they are able to record. Also, to teach kids basic skills about the most basic principle in science, the scientific method and how to apply it and used to solve everyday problems in their communities.

In primatology, primate watching is a merging trend that can promote primates awareness while improving economic income of local communities. As bird watching, primate watching had the potential to increase our knowledge of primate distribution, habitat use and detection of emerging threats. However, we need to be careful to not used them as a competition where the only valuable thing is just to take the picture without looking at the context in which the animals are living. Although we don’t have a platform in which we can report primates in the same way we report birds (eBird), we still can report our observations in iNaturalist platform and make that data useful for project including citizen science. Let’s enjoy observing nature, not because is a competition but because nature is beautiful and deserve protection…

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