What about becoming a scientist, the citizen scientist, and learning what grows and lives around us? From 13 May to 15 May 2022, researchers, school groups, citizens, wildlife enthusiasts, farmers, and others across the Carpathians could come together to help document the incredible biodiversity of Carpathian protected areas within the first BioBlitz event called Meet the Carpathian Nature. 

This kind of event involves searching and identifying as many species as possible in a given location in a short period. Thanks to the public effort to inventorizing the biodiversity of a place with the help of researchers, the BioBlitz event helps to bring people closer to the nature that surrounds them and makes practical observations for science and conservation.

Even in this initial year, we recorded an appreciated interest of the public, protected areas managers, and NGOs. One hundred volunteers made nearly one thousand observations of common, endangered, and invasive species in twenty-four protected areas across the Carpathians, among which stood out, especially the observations of plants and invertebrates. And many more enthusiasts joined excursions organized in particular countries.

We are already looking forward to future years when we want to continue with organizing the BioBlitzes.

Meet the Carpathian Nature was organized by Tomas Bata University with the close cooperation of partner institutions from all V4 countries within Visegrad Grant. For more information, please visit the project website https://carpathians.citizenscience.cz/ and for the event results, visit: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/meet-the-carpathian-nature-2022-bioblitz-weekend

The workshop dedicated to Living Lab of Citizen Science was opened and moderated by Miklós Bán on behalf of the OpenBioMaps platform. He explained to the attendees the aim and process of a 3-day workshop.

Matyáš Adam, on behalf of Tomas Bata University, brought the first presentation outlining the scope and aims of the Visegrad project and the importance of sharing the best practices among citizen science projects and opened the topic of the Living Lab process.

Atilla Marton brought the second presentation on behalf of the University of Debrecén. He showed the methodology, results, and impact of the citizen science project Bird Atlas of Debrecén as one of the best practices in communication with the public and volunteers within the scientific project.  After these presentations within “Science Dinner,” the discussion about choosing working groups and co-design citizen science projects was launched.

The second day started with introduction word of Gabor Tihanyi from Hortobágy National Park Directorate and two presentations of citizen science best practices. The presenters were online: Sven Schade showed the policy and organization background of citizen science from the perspective of the European Commission, then Attila Szantner presented the successes of the Massively Multiplayer Online Science approach and how, when, and why to use gamification in citizen science.

After a wide scale of questions and answers, Györgyi Bela and Miklós Bán presented the aims of workshop sessions and the content of activities of working groups. Considering all previous presentations, debates, and own experience, the attendees agreed on co-designing a national citizen science project on monitoring and managing invasive alien species since such a general project is lacking on a national scale in Hungary. Then attendees were divided into three working groups – communication/motivation, methodology/technology, scientific approach aiming to bring together experience and knowledge build first stones to the project.

The results of fruitful brainstorming brought within working groups were put together to pre-consensus how to co-design an example national citizen science project and what practical tools and methods might be used. This experimental, explorative workshop launched close cooperation among particular institutions aiming to boost citizen science in Hungary and the other V4 countries. On this basis, Miklós Bán prepared and shared the working document with the attendees. This should serve as a living citizen science working group.

The part of the workshop running with online presenters was organized in a hybrid form via Zoom.

The symposium and workshop followed up on annual Round tables of stakeholders of the Carpathian Convention, which was organized by the Ministry of Environment of Czech Republic and Vzdělávací a informační středisko Bílé Karpaty. Within these roundtables, Matyáš Adam, as a Visegrad project coordinator on behalf of Tomas Bata University, presented Citizen Science in sustainable tourism and invited the attendees to the Citizen Science symposium and workshop the next day.

The symposium dedicated to Citizen Science as a tool for public engagement in conservation was opened and moderated by Matyáš Adam on behalf of Tomas Bata University in Zlín. He explained to the attendees the background and aim of the project and outlined the importance of using Citizen Science in communication in conservation.

Jakub Trojan brought the first symposium presentation on behalf of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Tomas Bata University as an expert in Citizen Science methodology and ontology. He covered a broad topic of crucial principles, methods, and tools used in citizen science projects with various specializations and showed best practices from Czechia and other countries.

Miklós Bán brought the second presentation on behalf of the University of Debrecén and OpenBioMaps platform as its founder. He explained the reasons and factors, why and when to use Citizen Science databases. In the case of OpenBioMaps, he showed practical hints and the infrastructure of Citizen Science in Hungary.

The third presentation was dedicated to the aims and activities of the Carpathian Scientific Council in Poland. This presentation raised a rich discussion about ways to implement Citizen Science to Council activities and platform Science for the Carpathians. 

Fruitful panel discussion on practical hints and adoption of CS tools and methods to activities of not only protected areas was followed by a workshop session.

Within the workshop, Miklós Bán presented a step-by-step manual how to create own Citizen Science project on the OpenBioMaps platform, and Matyáš Adam guided attendees through creating and managing own Citizen Science project on iNaturalist platform.

The next day attendees joined the field excursion to try to use both platforms for biological data collection under the guidance of Miklós Bán and Matyáš Adam.

Matyáš Adam invited the attendees to the next meeting and workshop, which will take place in Hortobágy NP, Hungary, on 20-22 October 2021. Györgyi Bela reminded that within the workshop, the attendees would focus on motivational, communicational, methodological, and scientific aspects of citizen science and its usage in cooperation among local stakeholders and project management.

The entire symposium and workshop was recorded via Zoom.