Making Nature Count

 

The Friends of St Ann’s Well Wildlife Challenge is on its way. The Park is home to millions of different plants, flowers, birds, insects, creatures and wonderful trees and the Friends are creating a wildlife map to capture its biodiversity. 

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The plan is part of a national citizen science program which uses iNaturalist - an app that the Friend’s Wildlife group is using to record sightings across the Park. This exciting new project encourages visitors to the Park to download the INaturalist app. They can then photograph and record their sightings of creatures great and small onto the St Ann’s Well Gardens Wildlife Challenge project site. The app will also identify the photo or suggest alternatives which can then be uploaded.

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The project is now up and running with its first Wildlife Challenge Day proving popular with children and adults alike, all keen to unearth and record their finds and be the first to upload them to the project. Help was on hand with bug jars to magnify and capture finds, identification charts and binoculars for the kids to check out the birdlife.  Paper sheets were also available for people to record manually so that nobody would be excluded. Similar events are planned over the coming months.

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Lynn Beun, a Park Friend and the project co-ordinator, said:

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“It will be fascinating to learn more about the different wildlife seen by visitors in St Ann's Well Gardens. The Park is a much needed haven for wild and plant life right in the middle of a very built up area. We need to protect this area but in order to do this we need to know what we have in the Park. Once we have that information, we can look more closely at how we can support the wildlife we already have and importantly what measures we might need to take to attract more biodiversity into the Park.

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“This is a long term project and the Challenge will be continuing until May 2024. To make this project a success we need more people and interested groups to get involved. There will be further ‘Wildlife Challenge’ events laid on over the coming months to encourage more park users to get involved – watch this space.”

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To get started download the iNaturalist app on the AppStore or Google Play and search for the St Ann’s Well Gardens Wildlife Challenge on the project site.

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