Cafe Scientifique: People Power for Wild Mammal Monitoring Tue 25 Feb | 7.45pm Suggested donation: £6

We are delighted to be joined by Professor Phil Stephens who will be discussing People Power for Wild Mammal Monitoring.

Phil says – Despite their often-controversial status in a number of respects, terrestrial mammals have not been the focus of rigorous and sustained monitoring in the UK. Widespread use of affordable camera traps presents the potential to alter that situation.  MammalWeb, a citizen science platform for camera trappers, is intended to facilitate improved national monitoring. From its early beginnings in 2013, MammalWeb grew slowly and steadily in both volume of data and geographic coverage. Recently, however, it has become pivotal to the pilot of an ambitious new approach to national mammal monitoring. This has resulted in an abrupt shift in the scale of data handled and website traffic. Here, I discuss the set-up and evolution of MammalWeb as a citizen science project. I talk about the potential of the platform, the lessons learned so far and some outstanding challenges. I aim to summarise our insights into mammal recording but also into the challenges of citizen science, more generally.

About our speaker – Phil took a BSc in Zoology at Bristol University and a Masters in Conservation Biology at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE). During his Masters he was lucky enough to travel to Ethiopia where he conducted the first systematic surveys of large mammals (including Ethiopian wolves and mountain nyala) since the civil war that ousted Mengistu. His PhD, with Bill Sutherland at the University of East Anglia, looked at features of the population dynamics of animals that live in closely cooperating groups, including alpine marmots and meerkats. Following his PhD, he worked on systems as diverse as farmland birds, Siberian tigers and the reproductive schedules of seals and their allies, experiencing locations from Bristol to Wyoming, USA, as well as the Russian Far East. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Department of Biosciences at Durham University, where he has been a Professor of Ecology since 2020. His research focuses principally on population dynamics and monitoring, in an effort to learn what makes populations grow and decline, and how rare they can get before they disappear.

You can make your (£6 suggested) contribution in ARC using the basket which is passed around in the interval. If you’d prefer to pay on-line the details are available at the event. Thank you.

Find out more at www.cafesci-stockton.org.uk