Month: April 2023

The national coordinators of Portugal Alice Pinto and Andreia Quaresma from Instituto Politécnico de Bragança made the big tour, visiting all Citizens Scientist to support the start up of INSIGNIA sampling in Portugal. Have look on the nice video and see how and what they did. Even Portugal has “not so nice weather”. Really good investment of the coordinators. Secures a safe startup and getting closely connected to the Citizens Scientist.

Today’s regular National Coordinators’ Cafe was the first since the start of the 2023 sampling in all 27 EU Member States. This was an opportunity for National Coordinators to meet informally online with members of the consortium to sort out any problems that might occur. There were some questions about different hive designs needing slight modifications to what is being done, but overall it seems that all is running smoothly with much enthusiasm from the citizen scientist beekeepers involved.

This year’s Austrian Citizen Science Conference took place from April 19 to 21, 2023 at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. The conference was initiated by the network “Österreich forscht” (BOKU Vienna) and in cooperation with Ars Electronica and the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft.

Robert Brodschneider and Kristina Gratzer from the University of Graz participated together with approximately 150 other Citizen Science enthusiasts.

Continue reading “Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2023 in Linz”

INSIGNIA-EU is now running in 27 EU countries, with 23 languages, having 316 Citizens Scientist using 632 bee colonies. It is with great pleasure and excitement that we have a short talk on the 4^th sampling day for the startup round. Have a look.

Project preparations are in full swing throughout the EU – also in Austria!

All Austrian participants got their tool boxes, so it was time to enter the next stage . Thus, on April 14th,  we organized a workshop for beekeepers in Austria. The main goal was to give instructions on how to do the sampling for the INSIGNIA-EU fullstudy 2023. As a physical workshop was not possible at this time, we invited all 10 participants to attend to the online worshop, which turned out to work very well. For one person it was not possible to take part, but thanks to advances in technology, we were able to record and provide the entire workshop.

Kristina set-up an empty demonstration beehive and went through the whole sample collection process. The citizen scientists were encouraged to interrupt and ask questions at any time.

Thank you all for the participation and the pleasant atmosphere and interest and good luck to all INSIGNIA-EU citizen scientists for the study start next week!

Kristina Gratzer und Robert Brodschneider