Hogs on Film: Using CITIZEN SCIENCE to Protect Vulnerable Wildlife скачать в хорошем качестве

Hogs on Film: Using CITIZEN SCIENCE to Protect Vulnerable Wildlife

Did you know the footage on your garden wildlife camera could be a lifeline for one of the UK's best-loved animals? 🦔 Hedgehogs are officially vulnerable to extinction in Britain. While they are disappearing from rural areas, they are finding refuge in our urban gardens. But researchers still have huge gaps in their knowledge regarding how hedgehogs behave, eat, and interact in these garden environments. That is where you come in. Hogs on Film is a citizen science project led by Lea Grayston-Smith at the University of Reading. By submitting your clips, you help researchers understand population health, social dynamics, and the risks hedgehogs face at feeding stations. GET INVOLVED Got footage? Become a citizen scientist and submit your clips here: https://hogs-on-film-3fb6ebbc7a91.her... Connect with Hogs on Film: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hogs_on_fil... Facebook:   / hogs-on-film-61551569339792   ABOUT FIELD NOTES MEDIA Effective comms is key to securing funding. I help research organisations tell their stories through high-quality video production. Get in touch:   / field-notes-media   CHAPTERS 0:00 - The decline of UK Hedgehogs 0:24 - What is Hogs on Film? 0:56 - Bridging the gap: Researchers & Garden Owners 1:31 - What we’ve learned from 3,700 hedgehogs 2:30 - Risks and rewards of garden environments 2:57 - How to submit your footage TRANSCRIPT In the UK we've been aware that hedgehogs have been in decline for a while now and as recently as 2020 they were downgraded to vulnerable to extinction. We know that they're threatened in this country but their status isn't uniform across the country. Some areas, like rural areas, we're finding that hedgehogs aren't really there but they're more prevalent in urban areas and that's where Hogs on Film comes in. Hogs on Film is a citizen science project where ordinary people can get involved and they can submit data which helps me to look at the bigger picture across the country about how hedgehogs are behaving in their garden at feeding stations. My name is Lea Grayston-Smith, I'm a PhD research student. I've been working at the University of Reading now for three years and my focus is on hedgehogs and more specifically I'm looking at influences of their diet, on their social behaviour, their nutrition, their health and their movements within the environment. Up and down the country every night there are thousands of people that put up cameras in their garden and they collect data every single night on what's happening. They've got videos and amazing footage that we as researchers don't have access to. So the point of Hogs on Film is building a bridge between those people at home and the research community because everyone at home knows their hedgehogs way better than we do and they'll be able to give us an insight into what's happening in their gardens. It's really important for people to get involved and help us to fill out the bigger picture so we can piece together what's happening. We started working on this in 2023 and between 2023 and 2024 we had over 7,000 animals that we recorded. So roughly half of those were actually hedgehogs. It was about 3,700 hedgehogs that were captured. It's helping us to answer a lot of unanswered questions at the moment. So we don't know how reliant they are on these food resources that humans are providing. And we don't know exactly how the social dynamics are changing when they're in a smaller space like a garden. So it's starting to give us some new information that we didn't have previously. If we build up a bigger data set, we can see what the situation is like UK-wide, if animals are using gardens uniformly and what animals are using our gardens. We can also look for the risks and rewards. When hedgehogs are in our garden it's a novel environment for them, it's a new area so they're going to be adapting their behaviour to suit that environment and that environment does come with risks. There might be a risk of parasite transmission, there might be a risk of aggression. Again, there could be a risk of multiple different species using that space. So when we're collecting this data, we're really looking for those problem areas that we can then work to address before it becomes an issue and to educate the public as well. And obviously we feedback all the information that we get, we feedback to our participants. So if people want to get involved with Hogs on Film they can visit our website hogsonfilm.co.uk and upload their videos and fill out a short survey telling us what they found in their gardens. They can follow us on social media, we're on Facebook, we're also on Instagram and we've got a YouTube account. If you just search for Hogs on Film you'll find us and drop us a message or email us to get started. It's literally, it's so easy. #CitizenScience #Hedgehogs #UKWildlife #Conservation #SciComm #FieldNotesMedia #UniversityOfReading