"BIODIVERSI-TECH"
Application to GOSH’s 2022 Regional Events Funding by Taxon Foundation (the Netherlands)
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Name of organization: Taxon Foundation (www.taxonfoundation.com)
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Email address: info@taxonfoundation.com
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Our organization: Taxon Foundation was set up in 2020 with the mission to involve the general public more in ecological and taxonomic research and thus create a better basis for nature education, conservation, and awareness of the biodiversity crisis. The foundation does this by helping laypeople, amateurs and school children carry out high-quality biodiversity research guided by international experts. In our projects, we maintain close collaboration with scientists, academia, ngo’s, companies, charities, and managers of protected areas. Taxon Foundation aims to inform society about biodiversity, ecology, and taxonomy by organising excursions, workshops, and expeditions, doing community science projects into biodiversity, and publicizing the results via traditional and novel media.
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Representation for a marginalized demographic: Taxon Foundation does not function as an organisation with a fixed membership. Rather, it gathers a different group of participants for each project. Mostly, these are grassroots projects, meaning that we respond to requests from neighborhoods to help with nature and science-oriented goals. This usually means that the group of participants is pre-formed, and therefore may or may not include minorities. However, whenever we initiate a project ourselves, we do attempt to obtain an inclusive group of participants. For our project Expeditie Achtertuin (‘Expedition Backyard’), for example, we specifically targeted neighborhoods with lower than average income and a high proportion of migrants. For another project, ‘Resampling Lichtenbeek’, we work with teens from a local secondary school.
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What is the event about, and what do we want to achieve with it: In urbanised parts of northwestern Europe, the membership of traditional clubs and associations for nature study is rapidly becoming dominated by pensioners, and youth nature study groups are seeing decreasing numbers of members. These tendencies are of concern in a time when knowledge of biodiversity is essential for the future of a healthy natural environment. By offering young adults a stimulating environment in which they can design, build, and work with novel, low-cost, and accessible technologies, we hope to get larger and more diverse group of young people interested in the study of nature. We will achieve this by organizing a 20-person international camp in ‘Youth Land’ on the edge of an urban greenspace (Flevopark) in Amsterdam, focused on participation by participants from the Netherlands, Belgium, western Germany, and Northern France. Participants will be young adults with an interest in both technology and nature (selected mostly by their STEM teachers) and representing communities that are traditionally poorly represented in nature study. The core of the camp’s activities will be workshops where experienced trainers guide the participants to explore various types of of tech-assisted nature study, for example: (i) AI and image recognition for gamified species identification; (ii) portable DNA labs for species identification; (iii) smartphone-based microscopy for visualising small organisms and their details.
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Levels of funding we would you like to apply for: USD $9910
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Brief budget:
1 week accommodation and food at 200 euros per person: USD $4000
travel grants for participants: USD $1000
rent of tents and spaces at Youth Land: USD $2000
tech and biodiversity materials and consumables: USD $2910 -
Documentation that will benefit the community as a whole: Each participant will prepare a 3-minute pitch in which they outline how they will use self-built technology to kindle an interest in nature study and biodiversity science in their own local peer group. Videos of these presentations will be permanently available on the Taxon Foundation website for other schools to adopt. After six months, we will organise an online event where all the participants will share their experiences and exchange successes and lessons learned. Also, Taxon Foundation will write a report that will be distributed among our network in the international community biodiversity science world.
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Addressing GOSH’s values of diversity and inclusion: Even though an interest in nature study in young adults in northwestern Europe is declining, those that do take up nature study usually come from a background of white, highly-educated, high-income families and demographics. Groups with a migration background and lower socioeconomic status are usually poorly represented. We will invite participants that specifically represent these communities to gain access to these groups and, via technology, get them interested in biodiversity science.
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Conflicts of interest: None.