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Bird watching: An easy way to get students collecting real biological data

Author(s): Ellen Wisner

University of North Carolina Charlotte

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Summary:
Poster on ways to implement citizen science-based bird watching into education. Presented at the 2021 BIOME Institute.

Licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 1.0 - published on 15 Jul 2021 doi:10.25334/YAVB-FE38 - cite this

Description

Citizen science-based bird watching is an easy way to get students involved in collecting real scientific data. Here, I discuss and share teaching resources for two different implementations of citizen science bird watching.  One is a small project that was implemented in a lower-level ecology course and takes very little class time to implement.  The other is a larger-scale project used in an upper-level biology course, and it allows for more independent student research and quantitative data analysis.  Neither involves any cost, and neither requires any special equipment or prior knowledge of bird identification.  In both cases, students enjoyed the activities and ranked them among their favorite parts of the course.  In addition, students reported that even the small project changed the way they view their surrounding ecosystem and increased their appreciation for the field of ecology.

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