The Best S.A. Biodiversity Project - The Virtual Museum (Please Support)

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Shutter_Eye

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I've been part of this venture for a while. The Virtual Museum is a really fantastic project run by the Animal Demography Unit. It's worth supporting, easy to use and it's one of the most valuable projects for conservation in our beautiful country.

Guys, adventure riders travel a lot and it would be really cool if we could get a few dog on board here - we really need as many people as possible to submit as many entries as possible.

Here is a brief overview of what VM is all about (taken off their website):

"The Virtual Museum (VM) provides the platform for citizen scientists to contribute to biodiversity projects. This innovative concept was developed by the Animal Demography Unit. For many people, a “museum” is a place to see stuffed animals on display. But the ADU’s Virtual Museum is not like this. The scientific part of a museum contains collections of specimens, frequently large numbers of specimens of the same species from different parts of the range, all carefully preserved and labelled with the date and place where they were collected. The ADU’s Virtual Museum is like this, except that instead of specimens in draws or bottles, we have digital photographs arranged in a database.

Members of the public are encouraged to submit digital photographs for the Virtual Museums listed below, along with certain basic information. Species identifications can be made by the observers, and are confirmed by a panel of experts. Distribution maps for each species are available online and serve as conservation and education tools. These maps include Virtual Museum records and sometimes also other distributional records which are contained within the ADU’s databases.

Virtual Museum records help expand the distribution databases for these taxa; they not only confirm the presence of a species at a particular point in time, but they also provide new distribution records for species and sometimes lead to extensions of the known range of a species."

In a nutshell, whenever you take a photo of an animal you can upload it onto the VM website along with the location and date. This helps us to build accurate species maps so that we can see (E.g.) how wide the range of the Impala is, how it's changed over the years, how commonly it occurs and so on.

Two really important points here are that
(1) the photos do not have to be fancy professional shots - any photo is 100% acceptable as long as the animal can be identified.
(2) it's not essential to identify the animal - if you take a photo of some unknown lizard on the side of the road, upload it, there's an expert panel of scientists who'll gladly ID it for you.

You don't have to be affiliated to the natural sciences at all - this is a project for ANYONE with a passion for nature and a camera who wants to contribute to our understanding of our awesome biodiversity.

You can get more information on the project by visiting the Virtual Museum website --> https://vmus.adu.org.za/ 
You can also visit their facebook page --> www.facebook.com/animal.demography.unit

Feel free to throw any questions you have on here, or you can ask on the facebook page.

It's really easy, fast, doesn't cost a cent and you WILL be making a huge difference. The fact that adventure riders travel so much makes all of you perfect for contributors - the wider we can collect data the better! :thumleft:

P.S. Please bump or sticky! It's a worthy cause. :)
 
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