Citizen Science, Project Noah and NMW

Project Noah is a community of over 200,000 nature-lovers worldwide. Launched in early 2010, it all started off as an experiment to see if we could build a fun, location-based mobile application to encourage people to reconnect with nature and document local wildlife. We wanted to harness the power and popularity of new smart phones to collect important ecological data and help preserve global biodiversity, and to provide everyone with a phone or computer the opportunity to become a “citizen scientist”.It would take scientiststhousands of years to collect the data that our members collect every year, and because we are a truly global community, we documenting organisms in regions where there are no official research studies. Project Noah partnered with National Moth Week in 2012, and an amazing  684 number of moth sightings were recorded by our members during the event, adding significantly to our knowledge of moth distribution and range. Importantly, by sharing their photos with our community, the members who participated have been able to change many peoples’ misconceptions about moths by shown just how beautiful and fascinating they can be. We have seen plenty of evidence of this over the past year, with moths becoming one of the most widely represented organisms on Project Noah, as more and more of our members have become “hooked” on moth-ing!