BirdLife Western Australia’s Southwest Black-Cockatoo Recovery Program has been working with local communities, landholders and land managers since 2001 to research, protect and conserve black-cockatoos throughout southwestern Australia.

Southwest WA is home to three black-cockatoo species – Baudin’s Black-Cockatoo, Carnaby’s Black-Cockatoo, and the southwestern subspecies, the Forest Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo. All three of these iconic Western Australian birds are currently listed as threatened under both state and federal legislation.

Gaia Resources has been working with BirdLife Western Australia to implement an online version of their new Black-Cockatoo Community Wisdom Survey to engage locals throughout southwest to share their knowledge of black-cockatoos. The survey asks a series of questions about cockatoo populations in the respondent’s local area in various land tenures and vegetation types, and caters for all levels of ability to distinguish between the three species.

Gaia Resources has implemented an elegant web solution to responsively interact with participants to deliver the survey questions appropriate to their preceding answers. The mapping facility within the survey displays spatial layers representing both native vegetation and national parks and reserve boundaries to help respondents accurately indicate the location of their black-cockatoo sightings.

As an aside – having worked on elements of the Western Australian flora since 1983 – I find this simple conjoining of map layers to be a powerful tool in visualising the full extent of vegetated areas within and beyond the national parks and reserves, and it has sparked interest around the Gaia Resources office in further analysing the representation of vegetation communities in the reserve system.

The Black-Cockatoo Community Wisdom Survey is supported by Lotterywest, and can be accessed here: http://www.birdlife.org.au/projects/southwest-black-cockatoo-recovery/community-wisdom-swbc

If you’d like to know more about Citizen Science please leave a comment below – or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au. Or, feel free to start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex