Tomorrow Monique and I will be heading down to Wilson’s Prom, our study area, to conduct surveys and interviews with park visitors.
It’s school holidays here in Victoria, so we expect there to be a wide range of people making the trip down, including lots of families and your general assortment of trekkers and campers.
This is mainly for Monique’s research, who is taking a more citizen science approach to the problem of nation park management. For the purpose of involving the “crowd” in the management of the park, she’s hoping to get a sense of people’s familiarity with technology, their photo taking and sharing habits, as well as the types of education programs children are exposed to in school, particularly those involving activity-based field trips where students have the opportunity to contribute their observations.
If you’re lucky enough to be near Tidal River over the next few days, watch out for a pair of tall students in cheesy RMIT vests holding clipboards and being friendly. There will be lollies in it for you.
In between harassing tourists I hope to have time to work on my location literature review, and spend some quality time with the rangers – the people I’ll be harassing for my own project come early next year.
I also want to spend some time working on the iOS app Reuben and I are making, which I’ll use in the aforementioned research, and, if I’m lucky, maybe a walk up Mt. Oberon.
The image above is of a citizen volunteer recording the behaviour and movement of Mountain Gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda.
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You maybe use the word harassment and variations of it too much in this entry. Other than that I like it.