A look back: The Citizen Science Award with ‘Forest Groove’ at the NHM

As part of a collaboration between the OeAD and the NHM, selected Citizen Science Award projects can present their research to museum visitors during the “Discovering Diversity” event series and find out more about taking part in the Citizen Science Award research competition.

The session on 12 June was organised by the Citizen Science Award project “Forest Groove”, which aims to explore the (bio)acoustic diversity of the forest using sound and creative methods. Through two short talks on the project’s content, collaboration with the participating school classes and bioacoustics, the museum audience not only learnt about the project and forest education methods, but also how bioacoustic research can be used to decipher the “voices” of animals.

Between the talks, several interactive stations invited visitors to get involved and chat with the researchers: visitors could listen to bird calls and try to match the sound recordings with the corresponding spectrograms, as well as guess which birds they had heard. They were also able to try out “Plant-Pot-Mics” for themselves – devices used to make audio recordings in the forest as part of the project. For the youngest visitors, there was a painting station where they could get creative and paint tree stumps. The event concluded with a quiz featuring questions on bioacoustics.