Citizen Science Projects
Citizen science enhances research and conservation efforts by increasing data collection capacity, supporting knowledge exchange, and building meaningful partnerships between scientists and the public.
Citizen science is the practice of involving members of the public in scientific research and data collection.
Unfortunately, many areas of the Niagara Region lack important baseline ecological information, including species distributions (particularly species at risk), plant and tree inventories, wetland hydrology, soil characteristics, and the presence of invasive species.
By participating in citizen science projects, community members can help fill these knowledge gaps and contribute valuable data that supports research, conservation, and environmental stewardship across our rapidly changing landscape.
Community involvement allows us to collect baseline ecological data more efficiently and use it to support research projects, conservation initiatives, environmental assessments, and technical reports.
All data collected through our projects, whether by 8Trees staff or community participants, will be shared with the Natural Heritage Information Centre (NHIC) to help improve biodiversity records and support conservation planning across Ontario. Appropriate records may also be shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), making biodiversity information accessible to researchers and conservation practitioners worldwide.
To support this initiative, we have developed user-friendly smartphone data collection tools that allow members of the public to easily contribute observations from the field.
