All-Russian project of the Theriological Society at the Russian Academy of Sciences "Mammals of Russia", headed by an employee of the IEE RAS, Ph.D. Andrey Lisovsky, was shortlisted for the All-Russian Prize "For Loyalty to Science" in the "Environmental Education" nomination. The shortlist was compiled based on the voting results of the Expert Council of the VIII All-Russian Prize "For Loyalty to Science". The winners of the award will be announced on November 24.
Congratulations to the authors of the project!
The project "Mammals of Russia" is dedicated to collecting the most complete information about the distribution of mammals in our country for the entire time of scientific research. Scientists cannot achieve this goal in the foreseeable future, because for each of the 600 mammal specialists in Russia there is 28,000 km2 of territory. Amateurs come to the rescue, ready to devote their time to collecting data in nature. Several dozen experts on social networks and on the project website answer questions of interest to amateurs, explain how to observe and photograph mammals so that these observations are of value to science, discuss the latest innovations in zoology. Zoologists and designers organize regular information campaigns in social networks, focusing the attention of the general public on environmental awareness issues.
The scientific return of this activity is quite high: more than 10.1% of all the data of the "Mammals of Russia" are today collected by several thousand amateurs, while 76.7% of them were confidently identified by specialists from the photos attached to the observations. "Reliable" amateur observations cover 192 out of 323 species registered in Russia.