 Kia ora tātou. Good afternoon everyone, my name's Ruby Moore and I'm going to talk to you today along with Tom Rollins about a project that we've been working on together. So, the name is CSI Pukakawa. It's not crime scene investigation but citizen science investigations. So, it's actually been a really interesting process putting this presentation together because it started as quite a vague idea. We kind of knew what we wanted to do but to actually put it together in a way that we can explain to our colleagues and other people has been really useful. So, I work in the natural sciences department at the museum. I specifically manage the entomology and land vertebrate collections. So, most days I'll be in the collection on trays of really cool bugs and insects and birds. But we also do get some time to go into the field and do some collections and getting out and engaging with people as well. So, quite an incredibly varied job. I'm never quite sure what the week's going to be have in store for me. So, just a beginning to get everyone a bit familiar. If you're not sure where the museum is, it is in the CBD of Auckland. So, we've got a little pocket of greenery in the museum in the middle of that but all around there we've got urbanised city and lots and lots of people, cars and roads. So, this is where most of us staff spend most of our time. We get inside the doors and we spend eight hours and sometimes we don't actually go outside because we're so busy. But we've got this really, really cool backyard which, unfortunately, not that many people know so much about. So, there's this little remnant patch of forest in the Auckland domain which is just a few moments from our front doorstep of the museum. And in this forest is actually some really cool things. So, I've got a personal history going to the air since I was a kid because I grew up in Auckland and I always thought this was particularly exciting being you can hear the city around you but you're in this complete forest. So, that was kind of a cool juxtaposition. But in my career, one of the first bioblitzes that I was involved with was in the domain in 2005. So, bioblitzes, a 24-hour survey where you get lots of biologists surveying an area and it's a big public event as well. So, you've got lots and lots of people turning up and you're all out, fosaking, hunting and identifying and counting up the number of species. So, it's a big public engagement event but also, with those, we get some pretty cool observations. So, the Banda Kokapu is one that was significant to me found in the domain, a population of those and also, the catastrophe there, the Suda Econesis that was a really unusual find being in the stream. I've never seen this species before, it's really unusual and it was just in this tiny little drain in the domain so that got me really excited. But the Kokapu, there were about five of these really large Kokapus living in the stream just near the railway station and these are one of the white bait species. We've heard a lot about those lately in the news. Having an adult population, that's kind of a good sign but just a couple of years ago, some colleagues previous from a previous job were saying they'd been in these streams and they hadn't found any fish and they're wondering if I found any and I was like, actually, I've even got a record because we did the survey. So, they had no records but we went out and I was like, I know they're there. I'm going to find them and I got a few fishy experts and we went down and went through trapping these fish and I was very, very excited because we found a tiny juvenile and so this was just last year. So that was particularly cool because there was, I was thinking, oh no, those big ones, that's the end of a population and maybe there's no recruitment. One of these things about fish, our native fish had to migrate from the sea so all these fish, they would have had to travel through the city pipes to get up to the domain stream so they've gone right from downtown Auckland through whatever those waters are like to the stream so this little juvenile is a really, really good sign, happy sign for me. So about two years ago, me and some of the other museum staff were saying, you know, we want to have a project going on in the domain. We didn't have a particular name, it was just kind of roughly called the Domain Nature Project. We didn't put too many parameters on it but we started talking to the other curators and staff and getting them out. We've kick-started Matt Rainer and Josie Galbraith to replicate the bird studies from that Brian gilded 30 years ago so it's a year-long study documenting exactly how many birds are observed over a year. So we're halfway through that one and they'll be publishing that up so it'll be this really neat inner-urban comparison of scientific data. The fish surveys, that's something I've been involved with and freshwater surveys, every time I go down, Tom will vouch. I get so excited because I find so many mayflies in those streams and when I used to work in the Waitakiri Ranges, I get excited at one but getting so many. One of these indicators of really good freshwater, really good water quality and habitat. So to find them in the city stream which is dubious water quality possibly, I don't know what's happening here but it's really cool and it's consistent so every time I go down, there's a cool new species to find. Also entomology, I got a few notes from John Early, the curator, and he was like, well, yeah, basically urban, the CBD of Auckland is one of the least represented habitat types for our entomology collection. So we've got these amazing collections from all over New Zealand, all over the world but not that many people actually go out collecting in the CBD area. We've got a few but and right there in our doorstep, we've got all these unusual species, undescribed species. And entomology, undescribed doesn't actually mean that unique because so many insects aren't described yet either but just the fact that we can do research we can possibly help identify some new species from our backyard without having to go on a massive expedition. I just had to sneak this one and you can't take a entomologist or pretty much an ologist anywhere. You can't go out to get coffee and you'll find some bagg moths in the tree going to the beach. I mean, who wouldn't pick up a cute little maggot? That's a kelp fly. I've been converted to those from John recently. So this has developed over time into we wanted to get more science happening in our backyard. We decided our naturalist was quite a good way to quite a good vehicle to use some of that data. So this is an online citizen science programme so you enter your observations of your natural, your plants, your animals, your fungi, various different things. And this is a global website so it's available for anyone to see. So if you put up your kelp mayfly then anyone in the world can see it and the scientists or other observers get a chance to identify it, say what they think it could be and you get this online community of people saying oh it's this species, not that species and you get to get an identification at the end, hopefully. So we started getting lots of staff out doing this during their lunch breaks or wherever and this is the page that we set up. So we set this page up in 2018 and you can see around then there's about 700 observations. This just collects any person who's put an observation in a particular, in our map area. And I downloaded this screenshot from just the other day and we're now up to 1600 observations and lots of observers, lots of species. And what I was particularly pleased with is when we set up most of the observations tended to be birds, introduced birds or white-faced heron that everyone seems to see because it's on the field and it's the obvious thing. Or some of the things from the winter gardens like all these flash flowers that are growing in the hot house there. But I was quite pleased here to see the top is still a bird but we've got some native plants down there and one of my mayflies is crept up to the most observed species. Oh, okay, speed up. So that's our map of our observations and you can see already we're getting a lot in there. This is the cool mayfly. These ones only live in really good water quality habitat and for some reason there are hundreds of them down in the domain, urban sites, picno-centria, another one that don't often see and I'm personally trying to investigate why we're finding so many of these cool species just in the domain here. It's also providing some really cool leads for further research. There are scientists, lots of scientists keep an eye on this. This is a lace swing that was found and introduced species and it popped up on iNaturalist so of course we got our nets and went out looking. We also found a tortoise beetle, a hater beetle, another beetle and a lace swing. So that's just a 10-minute field trip. So it's been a really cool way of making a connection between staff and public because you get these little conversations going on through the website and the way that you're identifying and verifying it. And also just when you're using iNaturalist it's a good way to encourage people to actually record the details of where they found it and when because one of the problems is other times we get people just coming into the museum and saying, oh we found this again and then it makes it not very good. It's not very useful scientifically. So I have often wondered whether we, you know, where's the balance between digital and being in nature. But what really convinced me was being out at this incredibly remote place at the top of the North Island. This is away from the domain at the moment. But this is like so hard to get to, you know, you've got a dirt road, you've got a barge for an hour and there's nothing apart from your little boat. But for some somehow this was amazingly connected because we were in there with the Ngataki school kids and one of the students found this really cool slug and I was like, I'm not a marine baller, just so I don't know what that is. But we loaded us sending photos on my phone, on the barge and we're getting this instant response from Wilma at the museum and she's sending it off overseas getting these IDs. So I've got it ID'd and she's go, oh my god, that's the first time I've ever seen that in New Zealand. And it's actually this unusual blue margin head shield slug. So, and this goes up onto iNaturalist as well and there's this whole long big debate about, you know, how exciting this is. It's like we're in the most remote place you can see but it's just generating all this excitement. So that was my learning that I don't think it took over, I don't think it's becoming, it's not replacing the natural experience but it's actually enhancing it in this way. And to be remote like that the learning that you can have when you're out in the middle of nowhere and go, I wonder if this is interesting and previously you'd be like, I've got to take it to down to the museum and that's much less likely to have it. So I'll pass over to Tom now. I think these are photos of maggots. Yes, beautiful maggots. These are maggots. So naturally the learning team of the museum, oh kiora, my name's Tom. The learning team of the museum turned it into a learning offer so many hands make light work in this case. So we've always wanted to activate the domain and we want students to go outside and we get them to observe species in the domain with this program. There are a few parameters that we wanted to set up before we produced this program. So we wanted to enable student agency so we give them the tools to make their own citizen science projects in their backyard. Doing science, so this is real. The photos that they take get uploaded onto iNaturalist which are observed by scientists from around the world and a lot of researchers springboard observational studies into their research. Engaging with scientists so not only on the iNaturalist app but also with the museum scientists so Ruby and her team love to come down with us to actually collect other things as well like mayflies. The much loved mayfly. It complements the new digital curriculum which is coming out next year so it's compulsory in all schools. Digital thinking and becoming digitally capable thinkers. And the collaboration of nature and digital. It's quite a big topic but when you get to opposing platforms from nature and digital that could be a competing thing but we'd like to think that they complement each other in this case but you'll see that soon. So in the programme it's pretty simple. They come down with me into the domain, they get into small groups loaded with an iPad they get explained some rules and they get to explore any sort of part inside of the domain and they get to take lots of photos. They're equipped with a field guide that we've made so they get this as a pre-resource before they come to the museum to sort of load them up with the different kinds of specimens they could find in the domain too. So the learning doesn't stop with them just taking photos. We do send them a report a couple of weeks after they come a report of all the different kinds of observations that they found so with total observations and all the different kinds of animals, fungi and plants that they find. So I'm going to show you some examples of what students have found in the domain. Firstly the New Zealand giant centipede which was about that long that was just sitting in the path John Early here is our entomologist so he is very keen on observing anything that goes into our naturalist. Onto the right is Ruby's much-loved Mayfly students have found quite a few of those here's a photo of a spider it's a bit blurry and some of the scientists and observers do actually like to point that out and tell students how to do it properly so they're saying I think this photo is just a bit too blurry to give an accurate ID something to me that I guess in my everyday life but a student uploaded this photo of a fungus and there's an enthusiast down the bottom David White who likes to tell everybody all about it what happens to it when it gets older here is a photo of a western mosquito fish this is something quite important that we've learnt is that people from overseas don't really understand the situation in New Zealand you don't really have to read it but they're quite excited that they found a fish in the middle of the city but it turns out western mosquito fish is a big pest so it's actually illegal to put it back into the source where you found it so down the bottom Clinton who is one of our advisors it's a nasty introduced species are the following are some bad examples of observations these are just kids so some slack one is of a taxidermied penguin that's inside the weird and wonderful gallery the other is of 20 cents and if you weren't really sure they had to write down the description which is 20 cents a bit too blurry to identify the gorgeous Kit Harrington it's a photo of a photo in a magazine so Kiwi Fergus that's not really okay in case you're wondering we do teach them about being digitally responsible people from all over the world can see what they're taking photos of so we do monitor that number is since its since its production we started in May this year so we've already had about 600 students over six schools 563 observations that span over 116 species and 78 identifiers from around the globe have commented on all of their pictures and the students get to see all of that information too so I have a little video do we have time cool um please excuse my really bad editing skills today we went exploring and we found some stuff out of this book today we found lots of cool stuff and we found some interesting insects and took some photos on the iPad we learned about insects we found some different insects in the creek and like we found a snail and a centipede near the tree right there it was like really huge now what we're looking at was another life cycle of creepy crawlies they've looked at butterfly, mosquitoes flies, cockroaches and then from there nature today and that must have really given them inside of what it's all like so they were quite excited and when we went downhill towards the creek my group was so fascinated by the things they saw so yes it makes a big difference my favourite thing was looking at different types of creatures and insects that I've never seen before or her we have found an even more unusual petasplite in here just by coming down and having a really quick look so this one here is probably she grabbed the tree the white tree and she put it like on the floor then she went in the creek and she grabbed the net she scooped up the dirt under the water then she put it inside the tree and all these insects were calling out of it and then we just took a spoon and like scooped each insect so we can take a picture of it after engaging themselves in the classroom when they go out they see things in nature they were very much engaged the group which was working with me when I could not believe looking under the leaves looking at the bark all those things so that really really shows their interest and even they managed to look at that small guide we had which was there on the guide some of the things we had to look for they were able to find basically most of them which was pretty cool I find this interesting and exciting at the same time I thought this was a cool way of learning science but actually in that video or the feedback was that none of them really talked about the digital element of the program so it's only one person talked about taking a photo everyone else was more excited about rummaging around looking for the insects to take a photo of and that to me I think has been quite a successful element to the program we've also had schools ask us to come out to their school and to look at them in their own citizen science programs Ruby's been I guess kind of following some students who have started to take up iNaturalist and see what they have been recording one of them was that Kit Harrington photo and then some benefits to natural science I think if we go back Wade to many slides just the amount of observations that have increased by using iNaturalist and the observations in the domain have been pretty successful to the natural science team too in their observations and that takes me to the end so thank you so much for listening so any questions for Ruby or Tom yeah hey I was just wondering if you have any sort of learnings about science communication or like using this especially the interaction between the scientist and naturalist and the kids who might not know the kids kind of thing I had a new revelation with this one that I was there with the kids and I was showing them and describing what they had and like that's how I normally work and it's already cool and so I'm already into it but there was one particular kid and I was going yeah this is a such and such and I was downloading it on my phone as well but he's kind of half listening to me playing up when I just identified it online he was like oh my gosh it's a such and such so to me that really I understood that it was I became more real once I went through a digital media even though I was right there and I was telling him but it was only when he saw it on his device that he was like wow that's real so yeah unusual experience anybody else OK thanks very much