This is CBS I Am The World. I'm John Baxter with Katrina Break of the Economist magazine,

the Environment Editor, and introducing biodiversity and watching it, contributing to it,

better and better models so that we know how our world is changing, altering, perhaps

in the climate, a crisis, but also all the time. And we go to what can you do, crowdsourcing.

Between I watch a blue heron fish and a pond, very near where I'm sitting right now, I

learn that I can contribute that to a gathering of knowledge about blue herons, about fishing,

about Connecticut. How can people listening to us right now participate? What is this using

their mobile phone or whatever, taking pictures of how can they help?

Yes, so there's a large number now of websites and platforms and apps, ultimately, that have

been created by ecologists to draw on the wisdom of crowds, basically. I mean, people, this

has been traditional, I think, amongst the birding community for a very long time, that

it's not just scientists who understand the environment around us, that people have a

very keen interest in fascination for the natural world. We've been painting animals since

the dawn of humanity, but also just, you know, the man hours to go out there and observe

and contribute these observations. And these days, the best way to do that is through your

mobile phone. I'll mention two apps, but there are more if you'd like to go out and look

for them. If you're fascinated by birds, then e-bird is an app that was created by a laboratory

of orinatologists and they collect data so you can upload recordings, pictures, observations,

and you contribute to a central science. So you're not, you're sort of, it's not just a

pastime, it is really important to work. And then for the rest of the natural world, there's

also an app called iNaturalist or iNat, which again is a very similar idea. You upload

your observations, what you see when, where, and it goes into these databases that are helping

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